[cups] Brother HL-L8250CDN

[Ruben De Smet]

On 18-08-15 12:40, Brian J. Murrell wrote:
> 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.
> 

Well, if you know of any open hardware color laser printer which I can
afford, go ahead. I am in favor of it too, but I don't know whether one
even exists.

I sent this e-mail to openprinting [at] linuxfoundation.org too, but
didn't get a reply.

I wouldn't mind reverse engineering some stuff here, if that way I can
contribute Brother drivers and have my color printing back.

My model doesn't have a scanner though, so no reversing there.

The main problem is that I don't know where to start reversing, or where
to contribute the code. Heck I don't even know what programming language
CUPS uses. Probably C, C++ or ObjC.

So, if someone can guide me where I can look at some examples, I'll fire
up a Fedora 20 with the proprietary drivers, look at the network traffic
and mess with it until I have them reversed.

I just have to make sure not to spill all of my toner and paper ;-)