CUPS with older Brother laser printer

U

unitrunker

I seldom need to print or scan anything so I've gotten away with ignoring things like CUPS and SANE for a very long time. Recently, I was able to get an old Canon LiDE scanner working. Great. Next up is an old but reliable Brother HL-1240 printer. This is a simple single sided single toner model that can connect by USB 2.0 or a parallel port. I'm using the USB cable.

The printer appears under lpinfo and appears as a choice when adding a printer through the CUPS web interface. I've tried print/brlaser with no success. The closest printer models in the brlaser set appear to be the HL-1200 and HL-1210W. Printing a test page from the CUPS web interface results in a "Not found" error. If I install the printer as a direct model, I get pages with random gibberish.

I do have this old printer working on Windows 11 but I prefer to print directly from FreeBSD. Is there some other way to source or generate a "ppd" file that works with CUPS?

Does anyone have any tips for this specific model?
 
you could try the Foomatic PPD from OpenPrinting.org's PPD generator — this runs print jobs through GhostScript to rasterize them to the printer's format. you'll need to install foomatic-db and foomatic-filters along with ghostscript, probably.
 
If the PPD from open printing doesn't work, you could probably also give the universal driver from Brother a go in the linuxulator. It does use CUPS, so there might be a PPD that can be extracted for use.

EDIT: I downloaded the source and there are specific CUPS wrappers for the HL-1240, so that's probably a possibility.
 
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