[cups] Brother HL-L8250CDN

[Brian J. Murrell]

On Tue, 2015-08-18 at 11:48 +0200, Ruben De Smet wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> My system: Fedora 22 64 bit on Intel.
> 
> I bought a Brother HL-L8250CDN some time ago. I used Brother's
> proprietary drivers (as network printer) since then. I recently 
> upgraded
> to Fedora 22 and the old drivers stopped working.

Heh.  I have a Brother DCP-7040 which was given to me as a gift from
somebody who doesn't really realize the importance of open hardware. 
 My gut instinct was to take it back and return it for something open
like an HP but I also noticed that Brother had that proprietary driver
support at the time and decided to give them a shot.

Now that I too have upgraded to Fedora 22 (actually I think it was
Fedora 21 where it broke) I have a boat anchor.  Well, to be honest,
the printing works but the scanning doesn't, but scanning is just as
important as printing around here.  And printing actually only kind of
works.  It doesn't work with SELinux in enforcing mode.

So my initial/gut reaction was of course correct and I should not have
trusted that Brother would support this driver because they don't.  All
they would tell me is that it worked for them (which I am skeptical of
to be honest) and that they would not go to any effort at all to figure
out why it didn't work for me despite my sending them debug info and my
willingness to send any additional info.

Anyway, the TL;DR of it all is that I will NEVER, EVER buy another
Brother anything.  They have showed just how uninterested in supporting
customers that they are and so I will not patronize a company with that
kind of non-support attitude.

And, well, then there is the whole non-open hardware thing.  I
generally don't support companies that operate like that and I should
have stuck to my principles in this case and I wouldn't have a boat
anchor now.

So my advice to every/anyone is to avoid Brother [printers].

> The open source driver that 'just works' is called "Generic PCL 6/PCL 
> XL
> Printer".

Yeah.  This one I have is completely proprietary without any PCL or PS,
emulated or otherwise so I won't even benefit from that.

Cheers,
b.