I have had a Brother MFC-7360N printer/scanner for about eight years now. It generally worked fine with Ubuntu and Kubuntu, and when i switched to KDE Neon 5.18 it worked for a while too.

A few days ago it suddenly stopped working. Whenever I would try to print, even a test page, the printer queue would say "waiting for printer to become available" and the printer would do nothing. This would go on indefinitely.

I tried reinstalling the printer and drivers using the drivers and instructions supplied by brother, but it still didn't work.
Drivers: https://support.brother.com/g/b/downloadlist.aspx?c=au&lang=en&prod=mfc7360n_all&os=128
Instructions: https://support.brother.com/g/b/downloadhowto.aspx?c=au&lang=en&prod=mfc7360n_all&os=128&dlid=dlf006893_000&flang=4&type3=625

I had been putting off upgrading to KDE Neon 5.20 because I didn't have time, but I thought I would try that and see if it helped. Nothing changed after the upgrade, my printer is still non-responsive.

Does anyone know how to fix this problem? Or at least can someone tell me what to do next to try and diagnose what is causing the problem?

Thanks in advance.

If this is not the proper forum to ask questions like this, I would greatly appreciate it if anyone here could point me in the right direction to get this question answered elsewhere.

Thank you.

The problem is, there may not be any folks here familiar with Brother printers, and the issue is not going to be a Neon-specific thing. it may be worth also looking at resources with more Ubuntu specific knowledge, or even general Linux ones. The user base here on the KDE forum is going to be minuscule compared to other places.

If the issue only happened after an upgrade to 20.04, there would be possible solution, but since this happened in 18.04, it is not valid in this case.

The only things I can suggest is to go into System Settings, and see if there are alternate version of the driver available to try in the printer's configuration settings.

Does the printer work in another OS? it is worth checking that the printer itself has not had some sort of hardware failure.

This appears to be a mismatch between CUPS and the Brothers drivers.
I have similar problems on my MFC-J6935DW which had its functions limited by CUPS driverless.
I haven't had time for that yet, but you can try contacting CUPS staff or Brother support.

My printer was not recognised after updating Neon. I reinstalled the Brother printer driver and it's now seen. I haven't needed to print anything though to test it.

claydoh wrote:The problem is, there may not be any folks here familiar with Brother printers, and the issue is not going to be a Neon-specific thing. it may be worth also looking at resources with more Ubuntu specific knowledge, or even general Linux ones. The user base here on the KDE forum is going to be minuscule compared to other places.

If the issue only happened after an upgrade to 20.04, there would be possible solution, but since this happened in 18.04, it is not valid in this case.

The only things I can suggest is to go into System Settings, and see if there are alternate version of the driver available to try in the printer's configuration settings.

Does the printer work in another OS? it is worth checking that the printer itself has not had some sort of hardware failure.

Thank you, this is a big help! I will try the Ubuntu/Kubuntu forums and see what I can find. I checked for an alternative version of the driver, but there doesn't appear to be one.

beerislife wrote:My printer was not recognised after updating Neon. I reinstalled the Brother printer driver and it's now seen. I haven't needed to print anything though to test it.

Thanks, I'll give this a try and see if it works.

I had problems with a Brother MFCJ6910DW after an upgrade to kubuntu 20.04.
Found that /opt/brother/Printers/mfcj6910dw/lpd/brmfcj6910dwfilter was not running, due to missing 32-bit libraries that are not listed as dependancies.
Running this:

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get install libc6-i386

got printing working again.