[PLUG-TALK] Brother B&W lasers

John Jason Jordan johnxj at gmx.com
Thu Feb 8 04:29:55 UTC 2018


On Wed, 7 Feb 2018 18:32:58 -0800
Pete Lancashire <pete at petelancashire.com> dijo:

>Has any one bought one ? Model opinions ?

I have a Brother HL-2280DW. This is an all-in-one, black and white
only. Toner is relatively inexpensive, as the cartridges can be
re-manufactured by third party outfits. 

To install the drivers requires using the proprietary Brother software,
but it installs without a problem. However, printing to it is usually a
problem, that is, it works, but the print job hangs, or the GUI hangs,
or something goes wrong. This afternoon's efforts serve as an example:
I needed to print an eight-page journal article sent to me by a PSU
professor as a scan-to-PDF, probably from the big machines at the
library. The size of the file was 4.5 MB. When I sent it to the printer
from Evince the first two pages printed, then nothing. Looking at the
display it said 'out of memory.' I turned the printer off and then back
on again, whereupon it immediately printed one more page, then stopped. 

I went back to Evince and tried to reprint, but the list of installed
printers was blank in the GUI. From previous experience this means that
CUPS has hung and must be restarted. And when I say 'hung' I mean it
will take several minutes before a kill command will take effect.
Eventually I got CUPS back up and sent a print job for the remaining
pages, but once again CUPS hung, printing only one page first. This
routine went on for 15-20 minutes before I finally got the document
completely printed.

I don't know where the problem is, but I have half a dozen other
printers that print without a problem, so my bet is that it's the
Brother proprietary software. Sadly there are no open source
alternative drivers. Even more sadly it is out of warranty so I am now
stuck with this mess.



More information about the PLUG-talk mailing list