Friday 28 March 2014

Installing a Brother HL-2140 on Ubuntu 13.10 64-bit

When you let Ubuntu install a Brother HL-2140 printer, for some reason every print job will return an endless stream of blank pages. It seems to be a problem that's existed for quite a few Ubuntu versions, and while I'm not sure why they haven't fixed it yet (legacy hardware?), the solution on the relevant Brother support page seems to be lacking a key step for Ubuntu 13.10 compatibility.

The prerequisites for Ubuntu8.04 or greater are:
  1. "sudo aa-complain cupsd" command is required before the installation.
  2. "sudo mkdir /usr/share/cups/model" command (as it is) is required before the installation.
However, my system has no idea what "aa-complain cupsd" is. The solution is to install appamor-utils:
sudo apt-get install apparmor-utils
After this, I was able issue the prerequisite commands and proceed with the installation. I've seen a few people mention that you can simply install an HL-2140 as an HL-2170 and the problem should be fixed, but with 13.10 I couldn't see how to manually install a printer as one that Ubuntu has already recognised via the USB connection. Perhaps manual specification was easier in versions before 13.10.