Brother MFC-6490CW Paper Tray Selection

[radio_flyer]

Since openprinting.org seems to be down for a long 10-count, I'll annoy my fellow Gentoo users instead:

I have a Brother MFC-6490CW color inkjet MFC printer that I bought last year. After downloading the drivers (RPMs and DEBs naturally) from the Brother website, I converted them to tarballs, installed the drivers in /usr/local and the PPM in CUPS and got CUPS to talk to the thing over the network.

Most of the printing I do on this printer is on 11x17 paper. It's a large format printer with two paper trays. I have the large format paper in tray 1 and letter paper in tray 2. Most of the time this works fine, as the printer has no problem drawing from tray 1. However, I have been totally unsuccessful at getting this thing to print from tray 2. I've tried every lpr command line option I can find, I've tried specifying tray2 manually in CUPS, etc. etc. The thing just won't draw from tray2 under Linux. The interesting thing is, the CupsWrapper support document from Brother lists 'BRInputSlot=Tray1' and 'BRInputSlot=Tray2' as supported options.

The Brother filter is an interesting two-part beast--half shell script and half binary blob. To date I've been unable to determine where CUPS is losing the tray command.

Has anyone else got a Brother printer with two trays? Any hints on how I might go about debugging this issue?