Install Brother DCP-7020 Printer on Debian or Ubuntu

Here are some super easy steps for getting your Brother DCP-7020 printer to work with Debian or Ubuntu.  Note that getting the scanner to work is a separate effort, which I might detail in a later post.

  1. Download the print drivers from this link (if they change the download page location, just use a search engine to find them, or possibly try the files attached to this post):
    http://welcome.solutions.brother.com/bsc/public/us/us_ot/en/dlf/download_index.html?reg=us&c=us_ot&lang=en&prod=dcp7020_us&dlid=&flang=English&os=128&type2=-1
    You will need both the LPR driver and the CUPS Wrapper.
  2. Once you’ve downloaded the drivers, open up a command window, and become super user (use the “su” command; you can probably just use “sudo” with these commands too).
  3. Issue the following commands to (1) install the LPR driver, (2) install the CUPS wrapper, and (3) verify that your installs were actually installed:
    dpkg  -i  –force-all  (lpr-drivername)
    dpkg  -i  –force-all  (cupswrapper-drivername)
    dpkg  -l  |  grep  Brother
  4. One more verification step:
    Open a web browser and go to http://localhost:631/printers to verify that your printer is found.
  5. Type some text in a text editor and print a test page!

The DEB files that worked for me are zipped here:
brother7020

I presume I’m allowed to publish those DEB files here since the code itself is open source; I hope I’m correct.

Note: These steps are published by Brother in a very straightforward manner, and I highly recommend you check their page for some extra detail. My writeup just flows from my wanting to capture my own experience in case I need to repeat the steps for my personal setup.

Another note: I’m running a 64-bit system, and a long time prior to setting up the Brother printer as described in this article, I took some other steps to get printers working in Firefox. I’m not sure if those steps had any impact on making the procedure outlined in this post successful, but you might want to review it anyway.

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