[Solved] CUPS + Brother MFC-J6510DW = Only Some Apps Print

[lucky_rooster]

I recently bought and installed a Brother MFC-J6510DW printer on two x86 and on amd64 boxes. All went well and everything worked great. Some time over the past few weeks of updates to the amd64 box (emerge -vDu world and an upgrade of gcc to 4.4.5) it appears that something has gotten messed up in the printing chain as I can now only print from a few apps and am getting error messages from CUPS from others. Unfortunately I am not sure of the configuration (other than using gcc 4.3.4) when things were all working. Scanning still appears to be working fine - I haven't tried faxing.

Currently I have:

Code: Select all

net-print/cups-1.3.11-r4
Kernel 2.6.36-gentoo-r8
gcc-config -l
 [1] x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-4.3.4
 [2] x86_64-pc-linux-gnu-4.4.5 *

Printing works from
- Firefox (3.6.16, built from source)
- Open Office Writer

Printing does not work from
- CUPS test page
- evince
- GNU Cash

these all result in nothing getting printed - the lcd screen on the printer lights up and displaying "Receiving Data" but nothing happens as far as the print heads moving or paper getting loaded and then after a while the printer stops receiving data and goes back to standby mode.

Examining what is happening when trying to print a test page from within CUPS:
In the cups/error_log I see:

Job ### Remote host did not respond with data status byte after 300 seconds!

and the CUPS printer admin page sometimes stating "Sending data file (0 bytes)" next to the printers name and the status "light" on the printer image also turns yellow (from being green before printing starts).

I tried turning on some debug in the brother filter script, /usr/lib/cups/filter/brlpdwrappermfcj6510dw, and see some info getting dumped to /tmp/br_cupsfilter_debug_log - including the (postscript data?) for the CUPS test page doc.

Printing from both x86 boxes works (as well as a Win XP box) so I don't believe it is a problem with the physical printer.

I tried:
- reverting back to gcc 4.3.4 (12 hrs to emerge -ev system and world)
- going back one version of several of the emul-linux-x86-* packages
- uninstalling CUPS, reinstalling, and reinstalling the Brother-supplied RPMs for lpr and cupswrapper

but these appear not to have had any affect.

Any thoughts or pointers for trying to figure out what is going on would be greatly appreciated.

[lucky_rooster]

Some time ago this just started magically working again. I don't know what changed, but thought I would mention it.

[NevilleDNZ]

Some time ago this just started magically working again. I don't know what changed, but thought I would mention it.

I had a similar miracle and went hunting....

The printer works if the file /etc/opt/brother/Printers/mfcj6910dw/inf/brmfcj6910dwrc contains the right data, but if you ever change the print jobs specifications, eg use A4 paper, (or change the resolution) then this file gets truncated by a selinux policy.

The problem is half solved by trying Brother's hack:
Title: "I want to print using CUPS while keeping SELinux enabled."
* http://welcome.solutions.brother.com/bs ... rn.html#30

I went a bit further and created my own hack that works on Centos 5.7:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/whiteh ... ehack-0.2/

Maybe you will find the script "whitehack_brother_printer_with_selinux" (in the tar ball) useful on gentoo.

If you port the script mkwhitehack script to gentoo, I will try and back port and changes you make to Centos.

to Install on Centos/RHEL 5.7 use:
yum install ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/noarch/whitehack_brother_printer_with_selinux-enabled-0.2-12m.noarch.rpm

NJoy
NevilleDNZ