HowTo: Install a Brother Laser Printer HL 2040 in Suse 10.x, 11.x + User Notes

This set of notes is for assistance of recent & prospective purchasers. I bought the HL-2040 to-day because I was so sick of fighting with my HP Lasetjet 1020 and I spotted this in a sellout at $AUD80 exTax. Now after using it I can heartily recommend the HL2040 as a great-value, nicely supported pretty much out of the box, Linux home monochrome laser printer.

Pre-Purchase Information: Linux Printing .org has a page on the HL 2040. The comments there are neutral. The alignment on a printed page is said to be a little wrong. See below. The LinuxPrinting.Org page shows some recommended alignment corrections for use in page-setup in applications.

Anon recommends using the driver for the HL2060. I didn't try it because there's a driver by Brother for the HL-2040. In addition Volker Grabsch supplies a driver that I haven't tried, being satisfied with Brother's driver/s.

OpenSuse's Hardware Compatibility List: No Brother printer enties at all until I made one for the HL-2040

Novell Hardware Compatibility List: Nothing for HL2040.

Brother Support: On cruising the Net I get the feeling that Brother is responding to the potential Linux market. They've created a serious presentation of a suite of drivers including installation instructions. RPMs are available for some distros including Suse. The root-level page at the Brother Solutions Center is the Brother Linux Driver HomePage.

I'll cut straight to the HL-2040. You have to download the rpm of the lpr driver from here and the rpm of the Cups wrapper for the lpr driver from here.

Note: install the lpr-rpm before the wrapper-rpm. You can install these, lpr first then wrapper second, simply by right click on the rpm file and select "action" --> "install with Yast". [Incidentally, it would be a must to have Cups installed as a prerequisite to installing these rpms.] OK that's it for installation - that's all there is. After you've done that you should be able to open an appplication and print direct to the HL-2040. If you wish you can enter http://localhost:631 in you browser or Konqueror, and you'll be in Cups GUI administration centre where you can adjust the default printer setup, e.g. toner, page size, resolution. There's a para on cups passwords on this tutorial, should you need a password.

Alignment is OK for me: Anon (para 1 above) said there is a misalignment on the printed page. Perhaps that was by using the HL2060 driver. Or with the driver by Volker Grabsch? Anyway my printing looks fine to me just using my eyes to measure - which is all I need as a home user. I'm using the official Brother drivers. Maybe that's fixed it.

Network Shared Printing: I can browse from one of the windows hosts in my Lan to the Brother HL2040 on my Suse machine. I can install it using this Printer Sharing HowTo: Linux Print Server on a Linux-Windows Home Workgroup and it prints fine from Windows and Suse clients using Samba networking. I've also tested it for IPP printing from a Suse client to a Suse Printer Server and from an XP client to a Suse server. It tested fine for IPP using this tutorial.

Note 21 April 08: Although IPP printing works from a Windows XP client, it doesn't work from a Vista client. I think that's a Microsoft poilcy for Vista

Well that's all for now folks. I can heartily recommend the HL2040 as great-value at $AUD80, nicely supported pretty much out of the box, Linux home monochrome laser printer. I'll post anything further noteworthy when it reveals itself.

Swerdna
19 Jan 07. Last updated 19 Nov 08.