brlaser is an open-source CUPS driver designed specifically for Brother monochrome laser printers and multi-function devices.
While most Brother printers can use standard printer languages like PCL or PostScript, some models do not. If you have a monochrome Brother laser printer (or multi-function device) and the other open-source drivers are not working, brlaser might be able to help. Additionally, there have been reports of some non-Brother printers working with this driver.
The software is released under the GNU General Public License, which grants the right to freely use, distribute, and modify the program without requiring any permission from the software's author or any fees.
The following printers have been reported to work with this driver:
Some operating systems already ship this driver. This is the case for at least Debian, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Raspbian, openSUSE, NixOS, Arch Linux, Guix and Fedora.
Look for a package named printer-driver-brlaser.
You'll also need Ghostscript, in case that's not installed automatically.
Once brlaser is installed, you can add your printer using the usual CUPS interface.
If your printer is not officially supported, you can try selecting any driver marked as brlaser to test if the driver will work for your printer.
If you are able to successfully print, please open a new issue on Github and select "Report Compatible Printer".
When submitting the compatibility report, connect your printer to your computer via USB and run the following command:
sudo lpinfo --include-schemes usb -l -v
Please provide the output of the command so that we can add the proper entry for your specific printer model in the driver.
Example of output:
Device: uri = usb://Brother/HL-2270DW%20series?serial=000000000000
class = direct
info = Brother HL-2270DW series
make-and-model = Brother HL-2270DW series
device-id = MFG:Brother;CMD:PJL,PCL,PCLXL;MDL:HL-2270DW series;CLS:PRINTER;CID:Brother Laser Type1;
location = To compile brlaser from source, you will need to have CMake and the CUPS development packages (such as cups-devel, libcups2-dev, or libcupsimage2-dev) installed on your system.
You can get the source code by cloning the Git repository or downloading the latest release.
To compile and install the driver, use the following commands:
cmake .
make
sudo make installNote that you may need to restart CUPS before the driver is loaded and ready to use.
Copyright © 2013 Peter De Wachter
brlaser is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
brlaser is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with brlaser. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.