Brother Printer

[Michel Talon]

On Fri, 02 Mar 2012 22:40:21 +1000 Da Rock wrote:
> Are you sure its just a script? Any clue as to what shell it is using? 
> Bash? I do believe there should be some binaries there somewhere as well.

Yes im sure. I have a ppd File, they linked
to /usr/local/libexec/brlpdwrapperMFC730 and thats a shell scipt. 

I just went to the Brother site and downloaded a cups driver from here. It is not exactly
the same as yours, it is for the MFC7320 but for sure there is a shell script plus a binary.
called brcupsconfig3, which is called in the shell script called cupswrapperMFC7320-2.0.2.

The binary is 
niobe% file brcupsconfig3 
brcupsconfig3: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), 
for GNU/Linux 2.2.5, not stripped

So at best you can hope to run it with Linux emulation. Personally i have an Epson dot printer
and it is the same, the Linux driver contains binary blobs and cannot be run under FreeBSD.

If you want to  avoid such problems the only solution is to buy a printer with postscript
or pdf support and direct network connection, that is an expensive one. Here at the lab we are very happy
with Xerox sublimation models (i think it is an evolution of the old Tektronix phaser)
for doing color prints. In particular the use costs are low, much lower than with color laser printers,
in par with black and white laser printers.
But if you want to produce nice photographic prints, unfortunately you have to rely on good
epson dot printers or similar, which means FreeBSD is excluded, unfortunately.


--

Michel Talon
talon at lpthe.jussieu.fr