Insert Joel and Ethan Coen Reference Here

So in today's paper there's an Office Depot ad for a Brother HL 2240 Monochrome Laser Printer for $69.95. We really need a BW printer, and Laser is obviously the way to go to keep the price per page down. The thing got decent user reviews on Amazon, as long as you remember:

• It's Cheap.
• It's USB.
• You have to replace the drum at 14,000 pages (like we'll get to that any time soon).
• The initial cartridge only lasts for 700 pages (though you can apparently fool the printer into printing more)
• It's cheap.

So I went out and bought the thing — the closest thing to an impulse electronics buy since I got that $20 Canon Printer/Scanner when I was at Duke. (The scanner still works, the paper feed mechanism for the printer is broken.)

I read all of the installation instructions, plugged the thing in, printed the test page, got the USB cable from the $20 printer and used it to connect the printer with Hal, and turned on the printer. Ubuntu's auto print installer came up, recognized the printer, and …

Wouldn't you know it, CUPS doesn't have a driver for the Brother HL2240. (Obviously I didn't do a lot of research.)

No problem, Brother provides proprietary drivers for the printer. (Forgive me, St. Richard.)

It's not a difficult process. Go to Brother site, and download the .deb packages for the HL-2240:
LPR Driver (hl2240lpr-2.1.0-1.i386.deb) and
CUPS wrapper drive (cupswrapperHL2240-2.0.4-2.i386.deb).

Install both drivers, in order:

sudo dpkg -i --force-all hl2240lpr-2.1.0-1.i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i --force-all cupswrapperHL2240-2.0.4-2.i386.deb

At some point during this you'll get a message that the Brother printer has been found, and if you click on System Settings (under your name in the upper right of your screen), followed by Printers, and then Brother HL2240, you'll be able to print out the test page.

It works fine. Except …

I also want to be able to access the printer from Harlie, the machine upstairs. I previously alluded to doing this before (see rants, uh, points, 35 and 36), but that was with native CUPS drivers. I'll provide a bit more detail this time. Remember that the printer is installed on Hal, and we want Harlie to be able to use it.

So on Hal:

• Open up a browser and go to http://localhost:631/.
• Click on the Administration tab.
• Under Server on the right, click the box that says Share printers connected to this system, and then click Change Settings.

Go upstairs to Harlie:

• Install those same Brother Printer Drivers. You'll get some message about a printer being found. Ignore it.
• Open up a browser and go to http://localhost:631/.
• Click on Administration and Add Printer.
• You should see a box which says something like
  Brother HL2240 BW Laser @ harlie (Brother HL2240 series)
  Click its radio button and then click Continue.
• Fill in the information you want to use to identify the printer. Click Share this printer if you want others to be able to use it from Harlie. Again click Continue.
• Now for the trick. The next screen will ask you for the location of the CUPS driver. It won't be in the list, since it's proprietary, but after a bit of searching, I found it. Where it says Or Provide PPD File: click Choose File, and search until you find the file
  /usr/share/ppd/HL2240.ppd
  Choose this, then Add Printer.
• If the Force is With You, your printer will now be installed.

Note that you can use CUPS to change the behavior of your printer. For example, if you go to Administration, click on Manage Printers, and click the name of your printer, you'll see a page that has two pull-down boxes, one labeled Maintenance and the other Administration. Click on the Admin box and you'll see a bunch of things you can do. In particular, under Set Default Options you can choose your paper size, print resolution, ink toner usage, etc.