Brother MFC-J1205W Printer

Support Printers
1

So I have this Brother MFC-J1205W printer that refuses to work, I’ve tried installing the deb drivers from brother’s website and still won’t work

ksnip_20230201-103030
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it autoconnects as local raw and if i do manually select the J1205W driver it will say error and ask for ppd file

2

Assuming that CUPS is enabled on your system. It appears that there isn’t an already created PKGBUILD in the AUR for that printer. I have had good luck creating Brother install files from either .deb or .rpm by using the following guide:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Packaging_Brother_printer_drivers

3

The .ppd can be found here https://download.brother.com/welcome/dlf105289/mfcj1205wpdrv-3.5.0-1.i386.deb inside the data.tar.gz/opt/brother/printers/mfcj1205w/cupswrapper folder

4

ksnip_20230201-105539
ksnip_20230201-1055391043×699 101 KB

shows this

5

We’ve got a Brother printer at home. I temporarily switched my Manjaro machines from Budgie to KDE, but they had issues connecting to the printer. When I switched back to Budgie, I had no issues reconnecting. It’s something specifically about Plasma.

6

I was able to build both the Printer driver and the scanner driver from the .deb files provided by Brother.
The scanner driver is available from the AUR (brscan5)

You can install the scanner driver via pamac GUI, manually(makepkg) or in terminal:

pamac build brscan5

PKGBUILD: save as text file called PKGBUILD. Switch to folder with that file and open folder in terminal.
In terminal: makepkg -csr --skipchecksums

# Maintainer: John Doe <joe@example.com>
pkgname=brother-MFC-J1205W-CUPS-Printer-Driver
pkgver=3.5.0
pkgrel=1
pkgdesc="driver for Brother MFC-J1205W Printer"
arch=("i686" "x86_64")
url="https://download.brother.com/welcome/dlf105289/mfcj1205wpdrv-3.5.0-1.i386.deb"
license=("EULA")
groups=("base-devel")
source=("https://download.brother.com/welcome/dlf105289/mfcj1205wpdrv-3.5.0-1.i386.deb")
md5sums=("SKIP")
package() {
        tar -xf data.tar.gz -C "${pkgdir}"
}
7

Have you connected your brother printer through wifi? If so, please check if the packages for the dns-sd function have been installed, such as gvfs, gvfs-afc,gvfs-goa,gvfs-mtp,gvfs-nfs,gvfs-smb, and so on. And then please make sure the avahi service has been turned on.

8

Whenever I install a new Manjaro install, I make sure to execute this command:

sudo systemctl enable avahi-daemon

This is always the missing piece to make printing in Manjaro smooth.

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