Brother HL-5170DN and Ubuntu 6.06 LTS

As far as I can remember ever since I bought the Brother HL-5170DN printer in 2004, I had smaller problems using it under Ubuntu. This included among others the following symptoms: printing works only in Acrobat Reader and not in Gnome programs, Duplex printing does not work properly or printing slides which include lots of plots and pictures takes ages to print.

I think that all these problems have finally gone! And this all thanks to this blog entry. To summarize everything and adapted to Ubuntu Dapper Drake:

1. Download the LPR driver found here. We need the package for Debian.
2. Second download as well the CUPS driver here. Again: we need the Debian package.
3. Install both packages with dpkg -i package-name.deb. This will show you a hell a lot of warnings, but it will still work.
4. Add the printer with the gnome-cups-manager. As driver you need to select: “Brother HL-5170DN for CUPS (en)”. For some odd reasons I had to alter the device URI, as it was set to a default value.

Finally I can strike this through on my TODO list!

Update: For the hl5170dnlpr package to install cleanly, one has to create the directory: /var/spool/lpd and uncomment the last line of /var/lib/dpkg/info/hl5170dnlpr.postinst.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 22nd, 2006 at 10:50 am and is filed under linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.