I had a similar problem with brother printer/scanner MFC-J625DW.
Could not get the scanner to work until I followed the instructions on this faq. Second item, "I cannot find the brother machine". Apparently, some files are copied into the wrong folder. My system is lubuntu 17.10 32-bit and the driver is brscan4. So also for brscan4 you need this fix. (I have also been editing the 'rules' file , but in the end reverted everything as it did not solve anything.)
According to the faq the fix is :
Check if the following directory exist.
For 64bit Users:
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/sane
For 32bit Users:
/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/sane
Type the following command if the above directory exists.
For 64bit Users:
Command : sudo cp /usr/lib64/sane/libsane-brother* /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/sane
For 32bit Users:
Command : sudo cp /usr/lib/sane/libsane-brother* /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/sane
To clarify I will list all actions I did to get my MFC-J625DW to work (reboot between some steps may be useful):
- download, unzip and run script for your device from
support.brother.com (this installed all necessary packages for my
device) Follow all instructions on that site.
- add myusername to the
group lp, owning the scan device
sudo adduser <myusername> lp
- if you need to find out the name of this group, switch on the device, do
lsusb
, note the busnr and devicenr of the brother, and execute ls -l /dev/bus/usb/busnr/devicenr
(3 digits per nr)
- did the filecopying fix described above
- to enable all features of brscan-skey, I need gimp, sane and xsane
sudo apt install gimp
sudo apt install sane sane-utils libsane-extras xsane