No support for my printer

[Plasticstraweater]

Hello,

I use a Brother HL-L8260CDW printer but the issue here is that there are no drivers for the printer and the only available drivers for linux are rpm and deb both of which might not support gentoo (the os) as rpm might be designed for fedora (etc) and deb for debian and ubuntu (etc).

[NeddySeagoon]

Plasticstraweater,

The Interwebs say that the Brother HL-L8260CDW supports wifii direct.
If that's true, it also supports CUPs driverless printing, which is the way everything is going now.
That is ... no driver required.

You can unpick an RPM with app-arch/rpm2targz and a deb with app-arch/deb2targz.
Then install the bits by hand into /usr/local. Not into /usr as that belogs to portage.
That not to so you will have the correct versions of libraries, or even some of them at all.

The path of leas resistance is CUPs driverless printing and see what happens.

[pmc]

Adding to what NeddySeagoon said: if the printer is connected to the network, CUPS should auto-detect it if you build CUPS with USE=zeroconf. CUPS driverless works pretty well nowadays.

[tholin]

I don't have that exact printer but I have a similar Brother HL-L2400DW printer that I use without special drivers over Wi-Fi. I use the "Wi-Fi Direct" mode which basically makes the printer share itself as a Wi-Fi access point. I prefer this way since I don't have to give the printer access to my home Wi-Fi and the internet. I assume the printer has telemetry and dial-home functionality that I want to block.

Here are the steps for how I got my printer working:

1. Enable Wi-Fi Direct using the buttons on the printer.
2. Connect to the printer with "wpa_supplicant -i wlan0 -c <(wpa_passphrase "DIRECT-KKHL-L2400DW_BR451e" "password_on_the_display")". Make sure you connect quickly because the printer will enter sleep mode and turn off Wi-Fi after a while.
3. Use dhcpcd or a similar tool to get an IP from the printer. My printer always hands out 192.168.118.100 so I hardcode that in a script instead.
4. It should be possible to ping the printer at 192.168.118.1.
5. Install net-print/cups-meta if it's not installed.
6. Start the CUPS daemon: /etc/init.d/cups start
7. Add the printer to CUPS: lpadmin -p mybrother -E -v "ipp://192.168.118.1/ipp/print" -m everywhere
8. Print something: lp -d mybrother -o media=A4 -o resolution=600dpi file.pdf

Your printer has an ethernet port so I assume you could just plug in a cable and do steps 3-8 over that network connection. My printer is Wi-Fi only so I haven't tested that.