Brother HL-L5100DN and Slackware Linux

I can print to my HL-L5100DN with the "Generic PCL 6 LF Printer wide margin - CUPS+Gutenprint v5.2.11" driver (found under the Make "Generic") in Slackware 14.2.

For more detail (and pictures of real print-outs!), read on…​

I eventually stopped trying to get a Brother HL-L2340DW (HLL2340DW) to work with Slackware 14.2 (my Linux desktop). It it works great with Windows. It’s small, quiet, and reliable. But being inexpensive, it’s a GDI printer. It doesn’t have the ability to do much processing on its own and so printing needs to go through a proprietary driver to rasterize everything (essentially turn documents into bitmap images) before sending them to the printer.

So after some reading, I decided to upgrade to the more capable HL-L5100DN (HLL5100DN).

The biggest differences (of interest to me) were these:

The RAM, CPU, and emulation abilities are what set the HL-L5100DN apart from it’s little "brother" (pun intended). Interestingly, it’s also almost twice as heavy (!) and a bit taller.

So, what’s the secret sauce to getting this thing working painlessly in Slackware 14.2?

By default Slackware doesn’t have the CUPS daemon run on startup. To enable and start it, this’ll work:

Now, in theory, the process of adding a printer to CUPS is pretty simple. And if you know what does and doesn’t work for your printer, it can take all of 30 seconds.

Immediately after that, I was able to print a test page from the Maintenance pull-down. It printed out almost immediately.

I gotta say, both of these printers are impressively quiet and fast and cheap (at least compared to the hulking beasts I remember from a decade ago!)

Brother does officialy support Linux for both of the laser printers. They even have a neat installer script which probably does most of the work for Redhat, Suse, Debian, and whichever other mainstream distros they targeted.

But the drivers are only available as (32-bit!) binaries in .deb or .rpm packages. So getting them working in Slackware isn’t nearly as straightforward as I would have liked. I messed with them for a while (for both printers) and decided I simply didn’t have the time or inclination.

The Brother linux installer is interesting, though. It’s a 3,000 line Bash shell script full of licenses, product names, and a huge amount of logic. Reading it, I discovered that you can find all of the network printers available on your network with lpinfo -v, though there are easier ways to find that out!

In addition to normal printing tasks from GUI programs, I was excited to finally be able to incorporate printing into my options at the terminal, where I spend most of my time.

I’d read that CUPS supports both the System V-style lp and BSD-style lpr print commands and a quick ls confirmed it:

Both lp and lpr are symlinks for lpr-cups.

You can see the current list of printers with lpstat:

And the current default printer:

Since I only have the one printer available to this machine, I wish to make it the default. That way, I won’t have to specify it each time when printing, etc.

I was surprised that I had permission to do this without superuser status, but then learned that if envoked as a regular user, lpoptions was storing the setting just for me in ~/.cups/lpoptions:

Listing other options specific to the printer model using lpoptions -l is also interesting.

Okay, enough messing around, let’s print a file! I know PDF is supported

And text

But what other types of files can I print? Well, how does CUPS answer that question itself? It turns out it has a MIME database at /usr/share/cups/mime (path found in the cupsd man page).

What’s all this? Lo and behold, there is a manpage for these, so we can read about them with man mime.convs and man mime.types.

In essense, all of the *.types files contain mime-type and rule pairs. The rules are either filename extensions or functions to test the content of a file (such as matching file contents (string or binary) at certain offsets).

The *.convs files contain the lists of conversions (via "filters") available in CUPS.

I wanted a more succinct list, so I filtered out duplicates, etc:

This appears to be an exciting list. But the truth is, anything which is essentially text, such as CSS, HTML, and even the image format SVG (which I use a lot - and I guess increasingly everybody is now that browsers support it) will all print out as line-wrapped text. So don’t expect any rendering or other special handling (such as syntax highlighting) of these formats.

The real standouts are PDF, PostScript, * GIF, JPEG, PNG, and TIFF.

Let’s try a PNG:

(And now we’re all out of white printer paper in the house. Where did it go!?)

I was impressed that CUPS scaled the image and even printed it in landscape format to fit the page!

Of course, the really cool thing about lp/lpr is the ability to send data directly to the printer without having to create a file first.

Let’s pipe the listing of the root directory / to lp:

And generate a graph with GraphViz (available for Slackware on Slackbuilds.org):

The dot command is for printing directed graphs and -Tps tells it to produce an output type of PostScript.

I don’t know about you, but I think this is really cool!

I have now achieved the printing capabilities of the 1970s and it’s a huge step…​forward?

By the way, I just witnessed the most painless printing setup I’ve ever seen between the HL-L5100DN and my wife’s Windows 10 laptop. She didn’t have to install anything. At. All. It was just there, ready to print. Sigh. That’s the way it should be for all OSs.

At home, CUPS was able to find and install the printer with only the above noted hassles.

I can ping my printer by name directly:

But at work, I needed to enter an IP address manually for the office HL-3070CW. (I think the reason has more to do with the office network than the printer itself.)

So, CUPS could see the printer in the Add Printer interface, but I couldn’t ping the printer by name, "BRNXXXXXX" (I’m not redacting the name, I just don’t have it written down.) I couldn’t ping the printer by name and it goes without saying that I also couldn’t print to it.

I figured the IP address would do the trick…​but how to find it?

So after CUPS scans the network for printers, any located devices will end up in the ARP (Address Resolution Protocol) table.