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I have a Brother HL-L2300D monochrome laser printer I'm trying to interface with a Raspberry Pi as a print server. Using Apple CUPS 2.2.10-6+deb10u7 and printer-driver-brlaser 4.1 from APT, the printer sort of works but will only ever print in manual feed mode.

I tried connecting to my laptop running Arch Linux and with OpenPrinting cups 2:2.4.11-1 and brlaser v6.r20.g2a49e32-1 printing works flawlessly. So I want to get later versions of brlaser and/or cups running on the raspberry pi. But that's turned out to be tricky.

TL;DR I need to know how to get Apple CUPS to work with a manually installed brlaser driver, or how to get manually installed OpenPrinting CUPS up and running with brlaser.

More details:

What I've done is purge APT cups and printer-driver-brlaser, then build and install the latest cups and brlaser from source. I found I couldn't get the CUPS web page to load; the systemd service may have been left over from APT cups, so I deleted it and reinstalled my build of CUPS. No good, no service to start and I can't find the binary the service was pointing to to try launching it manually.

So I reinstalled APT cups, and reinstalled brlaser from source. CUPS doesn't see brlaser v6, but still sees v4. So I checked what brlaser is installing from source and found rastertobrlaser and brlaser.drv. These also existed in a different path, where there were other versions presumably left over from APT v4, and where I presume CUPS was actually looking. So I copied the from-source version of brlaser.drv over the leftover; CUPS saw v6 but prints failed with no error in the web GUI. I copied from-source rastertobrlaser over the leftover, and now prints fail with "Filter failed"

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  • You seem to be on the dangerous path to a Well-known Error: Applying a "solution" before diagnosing the problem. Have you tried to configure automatic feed by browsing to http://localhost:631 and clicking on your printer? Commented Nov 1, 2024 at 18:09
  • @waltinator yeah, I've tried messing with the default paper source and overriding the defaults on a per-job basis. I haven't been able to get the printer to do anything but try to pull from the manual feed with Apple CUPS and brlaser v4. Commented Nov 1, 2024 at 19:16
  • I realized that I'm on raspbian Buster, and raspbian Bookworm has much more up-to-date CUPS and brlaser packages. I'm planning to follow the process in raspberrytips.com/upgrade-raspberry-pi-os-bookworm to hack-upgrade to Bookworm and apt install the right packages. Commented Nov 1, 2024 at 19:33

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