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Robert Sederholm
Asked: 2011-12-01 20:00:59 +0800 CST

How do I install a driver for a Brother MFC-J270W printer?

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I own a Brother Printer/Scanner, model MFC-J270W. I'm running on both a Sony Vaio laptop with ATI graphics and a core i5, and an older Dell desktop with a Core 2 Duo. I had no problems installing it on (K)Ubuntu 11.04, but now on 11.10 I've had horrible trouble installing it in either 64-bit, or 32 bit.

I don't exactly remember what I did last time to install the driver, but I believe I did the same thing I've done this time around. I downloaded the easy copy-to-the-terminal text (which can be found here: http://welcome.solutions.brother.com/bsc/public_s/id/linux/en/faq_prn.html#f00090 , made an sh file with the text, and ran it as root. I've had no luck with it so far.

One of my main questions is, when I run the sh file, it asks me if I'm going to enter my device URI. I haven't yet found the URI of the printer, and wouldn't know where to look. So, if anyone can help, I would appreciate either a link to another driver download that will work without too much technological know-how (I can do simple bash commands, but have yet to learn how to install tar.gz app packages) or a different solution to my problem. Thanks :-)

If it matters, I never installed the driver on my Linux partition on the laptop, because only 32-bit support had been released by Brother at the time.

11.10

1 Answers

  1. I've installed a brother printer last year, I have easy steps for it:

    (the terminal is not needed, all of it can be achieved by clicking files and using the Software Center, but I find the terminal much faster.)

    1) Printer

    • Go to http://welcome.solutions.brother.com/bsc/public_s/id/linux/en/download_prn.html#MFC-J270W
    • Download the LPR and cupswrapper "deb" format drivers for the MFC-J270W
    • In a terminal, go to the folder where the files have been downloaded with the "cd folder" command
    • Install the two drivers with "sudo dpkg -i mfc270*.deb" (you just need to type the beginning of the filename common to the two files, the * is used as a wildcard)
    • Open the printer configuration tool in system settings, "Add", "Find Network Printer", wait until the bottom left spinner stops (I'm being precise, because until a few days ago, I had never noticed this spinner indicating a search in progress). It should be able to find your printer by its own.

    2) Scanner

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