getting libreoffice to work with brother DCP 7030 printer

[mikefot]

Dear All,

I am running Gentoo amd 64 testing on a kaveri box.

I installed libreoffice itself rather than libreoffice-bin.

I ran the cups configuration and chose the generic laser printer option when trying to configure the Brother DCP 7030 printer.

Under libreoffice it prints blank pages through the printer..........

In cups, when you configure the printer, there is an option to use a ppd file for the specific orinter that the manufacturer, Brother would supply e.g. on
its website that you could download.

If you go on the brother website, then you get a choice of an rpm file or a deb file to download.

I chose the deb file.

In gentoo a program called ark or something fired up and gave me the option of extracting the file.

I tried doing this but it was not clear where the file would be installed on the file tree and whether ark would unpack the deb file properly or not.

Suggestions on how best to proceed here are welcome.

Regards

Michael Fothergill

[mikefot]

Dear All,

I forgot to add that I also run Debian 9.

The printer runs fine on it.

I might be able to locate the ppd file on debian for the printer and copy it over to Gentoo and use it.

The command dpkg -i will install it in debian.

That could be an alternative way to get at the ppd file.

Regards

MF

[mikefot]

Dear All,

I also forgot to ask a question.

If you install libreoffice-bin instead of emerging libreoffice itself is it installed in a way that makes e.g. cups etc run more smoothly when it comes
to seeing the printers you have on your PC?

Cheers

MF

[NeddySeagoon]

mikefot,

You need the Open Printing driver.

Rather than replying to yourself, edit your first post to add new information, until you get a response.
Replying to yourself takes your topic out of the Unanswered Posts search.

-- edit --

If you gen the RPM file from the Brother site, app-arch/rpm2targz does what it says on the tin, so you can unpick the contents.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[mikefot]

Many thanks again for the advice here.

I made a clone of the github collection of files for the brlaser driver on my Gentoo installation here.

I am not exactly sure how to get cups to use cloned files.....

I have noted that there is a directory in cups where you are supposed to put ppd files so it sees them ans uses them.

I don't see anything that looks like a ppd file in the github directory at present but maybe it is in there somewhere.

But maybe you are supposed to interact with the cloned git files in some other way here.........

Comments appreciated.

Cheers

MF

[NeddySeagoon]

mikefot,

A little bit of background on *NIX printing. All *NIX applications output postscript.
Its a format independent page description language. This means its up to the receiver, it need not be a printer, to render the page onto the display medium.
If your printer understands postscript, you are mostly good, unfortunately postscript has versions.

For printers that don't understand postscript, or have some other wierdness, the postscript that you would like to print has to be rendered before its sent to the printer.
CUPS and ghostscript between them do this. Well ghostscript does the rendering.

Your git clone is a source code repository. You need to ./configure, make and install the software. Ideally, you would write an ebuild but you can do in by hand.
Don't do any more that you must as root.
Do read the installer script. If it installs to /usr/local, or even /opt, thats harmless. Portage won't notice it there.

Let me play with the build system for a while. I dan't have a DCP 7030 printer, so I cant test.

-- edit--

The site is down for me :(
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[NeddySeagoon]

mikefot,

Clone the archive and have a look round. Do all this as your normal user. Notice the $ prompt.

[mikefot]

A great many thanks for the assistance here.....

I ran the installation commands that you specified.

I will now have a go at CUPS again.

Regards

MF

PS

The printer is working!

Thanks