Networking and servers • Printing on a HL-L2400D with CUPS server

I recently bought a Brother HL-L2400D, a black and white printer over USB cable. I though would be an excellent candidate for a CUPS server because it has Linux drivers, however Brother only ships the driver for x86/amd64. Previous Linux drivers for some Brother printers (like for the HL-L2300D, a generation older) were available for all architectures in the official Debian repositories. So, having to download the driver from them manually is a bummer but no arm compatibility means they can't be installed on my Pi 3A+.

However, the box86 project seeks bridge the gap here by allowing you to run x86 binaries on a raspberry pi 2 or later (models 1 and 0 cannot) . Sure, there is a performance penalty, but this probably won't matter for printing.

So, I flashed the 32-bit version of raspbian to my pi and installed cups server along with samba, similarly to this guide, but don't add the printer yet. Then, I followed the official instructions to install box86 by compiling, but they also offer some pre-built alternatives.

With box86 installed, the pi can run x86 binaries, so we can install the HL-2400D printer driver .deb file (from the official driver page) like
and add the printer through the CUPS management gui as usual. Enabling sharing means any device on the same wifi as the pi can locate and print from it.

Kind of clunky to have a separate power cord for both the pi and the printer, but made for a fun and useful project!

Statistics: Posted by blooper98 — Sat Aug 31, 2024 3:33 am

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