# Brother MFC-9840CDW

The Brother MFC-9840CDW is a business multifunction colour laser printer complete with an scanner, fax and auto-duplexer. Additionally, the printer may be used through both ethernet or wireless connections. This tutorial will enable you to install the printer on Arch, through a network connection (wired / wireless).

# Installation

On 24th June 2009, Brother released an official .ppd (postscript printer description) file which can be downloaded from the Brother Solution Centre page for the MFC-9840 CDW. This file contains essential settings for the printer and can be loaded directly into the CUPS web interface. Prior to this, installation was carried out through #PostScript and Foomatic or #PCL-6 and Gutenprint

## Prerequisites

- Make sure the printer is connected to your network router/switch. If your router is acting as a DHCP server, the MFC-9840CDW will automatically get an IP address assigned. If you wish or need to assign a static IP address on the printer, consult the MFC-9840 CDW Network Users Guide to do this.

## Recommended Method: PostScript with Brother's Official .ppd file

TIP: You can add multiple versions of the MFC-9840CDW by repeating the steps below, and then for each version, changing the printer settings with the Set Printer Options button in CUPS. This way, you can quickly set up default settings that you use often (e.g., color vs. greyscale), and then print with these options by simply selecting the corresponding printer in your application (instead of using the application-specific printer dialog box each time you want to print using non-default settings).

- Install the cups package and ensure it's working by going to http://localhost:631
- Download Brother's official .ppd file.
- Navigate to http://localhost:631 in your browser to launch CUPS web interface.
- Click on the Administration tab and then click on Add printer.
- Select the "Internet Printing Protocol (http)" option for the Device.
- For the Device URI, use: http://IPADDRESSOFPRINTER:631/POSTSCRIPT_P1. E.g., http://192.168.0.102:631/POSTSCRIPT_P1
- For the Make/Manufacturer, provide the official .ppd file that you downloaded earlier.
- Click on Add Printer to finish the wizard.

The printer may print a test page following this, if not, you can print test page from within the CUPS web interface.

Make sure to modify the default settings, such as page size (change this to letter, if you are not using A4 paper), auto/color/mono for color settings, toner save on/off, as well as duplex mode (DuplexTumble is short-edge duplex, and DuplexNoTumble is long-edge.)

## Old Methods

Additionally, you can set it up with either the generic postscript drivers, or PCL-6 drivers with gutenprint (as the MFC-9840CDW supports PCL-6 emulation). The postscript driver has fewer settings, and is easy to set up, whereas the PCL-6 driver has more options, although it is more experimental (and doesn't support color). As of February 2009, the postscript driver always has color on by default, whereas the PCL-6 driver is always set to greyscale -- so you may want to add two printers, with one for each.

### PostScript and Foomatic

The MFC-9840CDW natively supports the postscript format, so for basic printing functionality we'll be using the generic postscript driver that comes with the foomatic packages. (Again, it is recommended to download Brother's official .ppd file instead of using the generic ones as shown below.)

- Install the cups package. Make sure it's working by going to http://localhost:631
- Install the foomatic-db, foomatic-db-engine, and foomatic-filters packages (to get the generic postscript driver that we need).
- Make sure the printer is connected to your network router/switch. If your router is acting as a DHCP server, the MFC-9840CDW will automatically get an IP address assigned. Make note of this IP address. (You could also assign a static IP address to your printer, but that is outside the scope of this article).
- Go to http://localhost:631 to open up the CUPS web interface.
- Click on the Administration tab and then click on Add printer.
- Select the "Internet Printing Protocol (http)" option for the Device.
- For the Device URI, use: http://IPADDRESSOFPRINTER:631/POSTSCRIPT_P1. E.g., http://192.168.0.102:631/POSTSCRIPT_P1
- For the Make/Manufacturer, click on Generic, then Generic PostScript Printer Foomatic/Postscript (en) (do not choose the "Level 1" variant, as it is an older postcript driver for older printers)
- Click on Add Printer to finish the wizard.

Print out a test page to see if everything works. The above configuration allows you to change the duplex and resolution (dpi) settings within CUPS, via the Set Printer Options button under the Printers tab, but is missing the "Toner save" option. Of course, this and all other settings are still accessible via the printer's own web interface, which makes any changes the default settings of the printer (see the official Brother documentation).

### PCL-6 and Gutenprint

The MFC-9840CDW also natively supports (via emulation) the PCL-6 format, so we can take advantage of this feature. The procedure is essentially identical as with the postscript configuration above, except for a couple of things.

- Install the gutenprint package.
- Instead of postscript_p1 in the Device URI field, use pcl_p1 (the pcl has a lowercase 'L', not a numeral 'one').
- Under For the Make/Manufacturer, click on Generic again, but instead choose the Generic PCL 6/PCL XL Printer - CUPS+Gutenprint v.5.2.3 (en) option. (The Gutenprint version number is dependant, of course, on which version of gutenprint you have installed.)

Customize the default printer settings, to the extent that they are controlled by CUPS, by clicking on the Set Printer Options button in the CUPS web interface. You will notice that the Gutenprint driver has many more options than the generic PostScript driver. You may want to repeat the procedure above and add a second printer, and then customize this second printer's settings to your liking (e.g., color instead of greyscale).

Note: As there are many different PCL-6 drivers available, you may want to experiment with using these different ones instead of the CUPS+Gutenprint one. To change the driver, click on Modify Printer and go through the wizard, just like when you were adding the printer from the beginning.

# Scanning

Brother has released its own SANE drivers, called brscan. For the MFC-9840CDW, the brscan3 driver is needed, and is available on AUR. Then, run the brsaneconfig3 tool (use the -h option for help) to add your scanner. Also add yourself to the scanner group to scan as a normal user. You can then download the xsane package with pacman, and launch xsane.

You might want to disable the "Enable color management" option from Xsane (under Preferences) if you do not care about embedded color profiles (the brscan3 driver does not come with a color profile, and Xsane will continually warn you with a pop-up if it cannot find a color profile).

Category:

- Printers