Brother MFC-7420 printer prints a ton of blanks

[DjDeets]

Hello, I'm currently working on getting a Brother MFC-7420 to work. I've installed printer-driver-all, foomatic-db-engine, hp-ppd, and openprinting-ppds; but I still can't get the printer to work. I've also tried installing the printer drivers supplied by Brother multiple times; but as you can guess, it still doesn't work. Apparently it worked under Ubuntu, but when plugging it into an Ubuntu machine with the same version of Ubuntu, the printer continued to not work. When plugged into a Windows 10 laptop, the printer works. Which leads me to think it's a driver issue. On Debian, it either doesn't print at all or prints a ton of blank sheets.

[peter_irich]

Did you tried this?
https://www.brother-usa.com/brother-support/driver-downloads#q=mfc-7420

Peter.

[DjDeets]

Yes I did try that, but the supplied drivers are 32 bit and when I force install them with dpkg and run apt update it complains that it is missing a dependency which can't be downloaded. If I run apt --fix-broken-packages (I'm going off memory, I'm not sure that's the right command) it simply uninstalls the broken packages. I'll see what the dependency is in a couple hours.

[arzgi]

Check this also
https://www.openprinting.org/printer/Brother/Brother-MFC-7420

I've enabled multiarch to run 32-bit programs, but have no idea would that work in your case.

[DjDeets]

The open printing brother links don't work and as far as I know there is no ppd available from there. It says something about being a "User-contributed Printer Entry" which hasn't been verified yet. I will check out the multiarch thing though. Thanks for the tip.

[arzgi]

Yes, the openprinting link I gave is guite poor.

But found this, good to learn to use search tools.

https://www.brother.ee/support/mfc-7420/faqs/how-to-trouble-shooting/faq00100678_000

[shep]

Debian has a native driver for the MFC-7240
https://wiki.debian.org/Brother

This does not need 32 bit libs so I would uninstall multiarch and the 3rd party driver from Brother.

[arzgi]

Debian has a native driver for the MFC-7240
https://wiki.debian.org/Brother

This does not need 32 bit libs so I would uninstall multiarch and the 3rd party driver from Brother.

7420 <> 7240

[shep]

Upstream says support for MFC-7420 also.

https://github.com/pdewacht/brlaser

Note the latest brlaser release is newer than the version in Buster and it looks like the printer definitions for the MFC-7420 were added in version 6

https://github.com/pdewacht/brlaser/commit/eae5f9ba98d48901638fc226777825805d734ade

Buster-backports does not have any updates for brlaser. I think Steve Pusser, a forum regular, is involved with updated packages. Perhaps you can reach out to him. It should be an easy build.

[arzgi]

I am not the OP, but that seems the most decent approach.

Brother suggesting use of 32-bit cups and old 32-bit driver is very lazy and quite overkill.