Today I bought a wireless printer: the Brother HL-2280DW. It works fine from my work computer (MacBook Pro) and from my girlfriend’s Windows PC.
I downloaded the CUPS and printer driver from the Brother web site. Eventually got them installed. The printer appears as normal in the GUI on OpenSuSE 11.4. But every time I try printing a test page, I get an error message that it can’t connect.
A friend who knows much more about Linux than I do spent 1 hour on the phone with me tonight. Tried many troubleshooting steps. Here’s his email summary:
Running suse11.4, trying to install Brother HL-2280DW – installed drivers from brother, install of printer went flawlessly (using downloaded drivers and everything), but cannot print.
Error message is:
<cannot communicate, or whatever it is>
From brother's site, FAQ site:
performed the following as it seemed relevant:
"**My distribution uses AppArmor (e.g. Ubuntu, openSUSE) and I can not print. **Try to change the security software setting for cups to complain-mode (Superuser authorization will be required)Command : aa-complain cupsd"
Did that; restarted cupsd, still same error message.
Also tried disabling the local firewall; same error message.
Presumably the answer to 1. is “yes” because how else could my computer have found the printer when I searched by the printer’s IP address? Anyway, never assume. I’ll check when I get home from work tonight and will past the .conf file contents here.
ekoblentz wrote:
> Today I bought a wireless printer: the Brother HL-2280DW. It works fine
> from my work computer (MacBook Pro) and from my girlfriend’s Windows PC.
>
> I downloaded the CUPS and printer driver from the Brother web site.
> Eventually got them installed. The printer appears as normal in the GUI
> on OpenSuSE 11.4. But every time I try printing a test page, I get an
> error message that it can’t connect.
> Error message is:
> <cannot communicate, or whatever it is>
> Did that; restarted cupsd, still same error message.
>
> Also tried disabling the local firewall; same error message.
Where does this error message appear? Is there any other error
information in any logs? e.g. /var/log/cups/error_log, /var/log/messages
I’m not certain what you have tried- you were too vague in your opening post. The more specific information supplied, the less assumptions and subsequent questions that have to be made. BTW, SNMP can be used to discover printers without any knowledge of IP specific addresses. I don’t use automatic discovery typically when configuring network-attached printers. Instead, I use the CUPS web interface and add the printer URI manually. Now, knowing what your printer URI looks like (and associated entries in /etc/cups/printers.conf) may assist with eliminating some common possible mistakes. I have configured several Brother printers, in work and home environments, network-attached and locally-connected, without issue.
Try using the printer’s IP address directly (eg for 192.168.9.5):
DeviceURI lpd://192.168.9.3/BINARY_P1
*You will need to edit /etc/printers.conf with root privileges to do this eg
sudo nano /etc/cups/printers.conf
You could also try this using the AppSocket protocol socket:// instead, like this (change the IP address to suit)
<DefaultPrinter Brother-HL2280DW>
Info Brother HL2280DW
Location BRW008092909F9D
MakeModel Brother HL2280DW for CUPS
DeviceURI socket://192.168.9.5
State Idle
StateTime 1357192339
Type 8392724
Accepting Yes
Shared Yes
JobSheets none none
QuotaPeriod 0
PageLimit 0
KLimit 0
OpPolicy default
ErrorPolicy stop-printer
</Printer>
Note that I removed the filter entries in the latter configuration. The PPD (/etc/cups/ppd/HL2280DW.ppd) should provide the necessary AFAIU. (I’ll leave you to experiment with and without.)
I’ll check when I get home from work tonight and will past the .conf file contents here.