Hello! Like many people, I came here from Lunduke. I’ve used many distros over the years, including Mandriva/Mandrake back in 2009-2010. As someone who still prefers KDE, and hearing how great the community and project leadership are here, I wanted to give OpenMandriva a try on an old laptop!
However, I cannot for the life of me get my printer to work with OpenMandriva. It is a Brother HL-L2350DW, and every other distro I’ve tried detects it as a driverless printer over Wi-Fi without me having to select a driver manually. But on OpenMandriva, I get the error message “Unable to locate recommended drivers. Click |Refresh| to try again or choose a driver manually.”
What I’ve tried so far:
Installing all of the cups-driver and gutenprint-cups packages
Installing system-config-printer-gui (saw this recommended in another thread, didn’t solve the problem)
Installing and enabling cups-browsed
Setting it up with the “Generic IPP Everywhere” driver manually
Setting it up manually using the PCL or PostScript drivers
Using localhost:631 and setting it up using the CUPS web interface instead of KCM
None of these worked. I haven’t tried using it with USB, but I haven’t gotten that method to work on Linux at all in the 7 years I’ve had this printer. It works fine wirelessly on my desktop PC that’s currently running Arch as well as every other distro I’ve tried on this laptop.
Setting it up manually as a generic IPP Everywhere printer on OpenMandriva just causes it to spit out a bunch of blank pages until it runs out of paper, which shouldn’t happen since this printer is an IPP Everywhere printer. I’m not sure what else I can try at this point, but not being able to print is a dealbreaker for me.
Can I ask what desktop environments you have been using. I have always had problems getting my printer (brother mfc-j4620w) to work with KDE no matter the distro, which is why I went back to linuxmint a couple of years ago. I had the same problems with lxqt so always wondered if it’s a Qt thing. I’ve never had problems like that using GTK based DEs, my printer was usually detected and add automaticaly. Thats just my experience I don’t really undersatand enough to draw any conclusions. I’ve not yet has occasion to try and print something from OM so not sure how its working for me at the moment. But i have also replaced the brother whith a HP since.
Have you installed the firewall yet? If so, open TCP port 631. That is for ipp.
My Brother printer did the same thing. The driver package has worked in the past, but it shows as deprecated now. I went with Manual > AppSocket/JetDirect > socket://ipaddress > Generic > Generic PCL Laser Printer.
Oh yeah, I also add my printer to my /etc/hosts file. It allows me to use the scanner as well.
Select Linux (rpm) and click OK
Click Driver Install Tool
Click the blue Agree to the EULA and download button
Go to your Downloads folder
Right Click the linux-brprinter-installer-2.2.4-1.gz file
Click Extract > Extract Here
Open Konsole
CD Downloads
sudo bash linux-brprinter-installer-2.2.4-1
click through the installation. You will have to answer Y several times. You will need to give it the model name HL-L2350DW and when it ask how to connect, select 8 and give it the ip address.
Sorry I missed this issue, the script from brother is exactly what I use for my three Brother printers and it works excellently and without fail. As I have used it and understand it, it requires the IP address of the printer to be static, but that’s very easy to do in your router’s software, I’m sure.
I have an update, and a solution! I dug around some more, retraced the steps I followed to get it working on Arch, and found out that OpenMandriva, unlike most other desktop-oriented distros, doesn’t enable Avahi (zeroconf) by default. I got it to work by running this:
# systemctl enable avahi-daemon.service
and rebooting and trying it again.
Thanks to everybody who tried to help! I’ve never used the Brother driver package on any distro, and using Avahi doesn’t require the printer to have a static IP or installation of any drivers other than what CUPS provides. Avahi basically enables CUPS to pick up driverless wireless (IPP Everywhere) printers automatically.
And to answer the questions about desktop environment, I’ve been primarily using KDE for many years, which is one thing that drew me to OpenMandriva
Thank you for pointing me in the right direction. This helped me get my Brother MFC-7840DW working, which was the last non-working piece to my new OMALx environment.
Here’s how I installed it by compiling the driver package from source:
Glad you got it going, I have a Brother HL-L2360DW and I couldnt get wifi working on it on windows or android. I had to use ethernet. OM picked it up just fine that way too.
Correct. People often forget that forum are not intended as individual support (there are paid support services for that) but to share knowledge instead.
Do ut des ?
