On Sun, Jun 14, 2015 at 07:39:37AM -0400, LM wrote:
> Hendrik Boom wrote:
> > I think that Brother is one of the companies that advertises actual
> > Unix support, and that my printer an HL-3170CDW, at least, accepts a
> > variety of networked protocols, including some that originated in Unix.
> > But I don't know how to access them without CUPS.
> >
> > There must be a way.
>
> I've had a lot of problems with getting hardware working properly with
> Linux, so when I bought my last printer, I tried to do some research
> on what printers had support for Linux. As mentioned, Brother
> advertises support. So, I ended up buying my first (and probably
> last) Brother printer. Besides the fact that the model seems to have
> an issue with the ink and stops printing often, I found out that the
> drivers are proprietary. There are rpm and deb versions of the driver
> (in binary format) and I've seen some information on how to get them
> to work with systems like Slackware that need tarballs. However, if
> you're running with a different processor or using a different C
> library like uclibc (which I was at one point) or musl, you're going
> to have issues. The way I've seen FreeBSD users get Brother printers
> running is to run Linux versions of printing software using their
> Linux compatibility layer.

brlaser (github.com/pdewacht/brlaser) works for at least some Brother DCP
printers, and builds (with a very new compiler) on Alpine.
Requires the cups development libs.

For the more plain Brother printers, using the right PCL or Postscript
driver may be adequate; I know I got a couple HL-series printers
working with PCL (PCL5 drivers, IIRC).

> Postscript printers seem like the best option. Similar to DOS
> systems, you can copy a binary file to lpt, serial, etc.
> Unfortunately, many printers these days are not Postscript compatible.
> PCL seems like the most supported format after Postscript. That's
> where programs like GhostPCL come in. A lot of printers support the
> wingdi format which is based on Windows GDI (graphic device interface)
> API. I've only seen a few projects that try to support that on Linux.

> Cups may be a great solution for a corporation or a situation where
> printers are networked. I think it can be overkill for a single user
> with a dedicated printer. As mentioned, Cups does work on BSD and
> Apple systems so the systemd dependency should not be a real issue.
> It seems to be used as the default printing option on most Linux
> systems I've looked at. It would be really nice to have some viable
> alternatives for users who don't need all the features Cups can
> provide. I like the idea of trying to avoid monopolies in
> libraries/programs. Cups seems to be a monopoly on most systems at
> this point.

CUPS is a lot more basic in functionality than it looks:
a meta-driver for conversions from format to format that ultimately goes
(any format) > PostScript/PDF > (printer-specific format),
plus a queue manager and a way to copy files to their destination.

LprNG does the same thing, but has a much more limited set of drivers
available; the Brother binary drivers do support lprng.

XPrint is no longer really supported by anyone, though RedHat does
include it in their latest RHEL version; it's a daemon that runs on
top of a printing daemon, and provides something along the lines of an
X server rendering to paper. It was easy to add "pixel perfect"
WYSIWYG printing to X applications, but the maintainers found the
code unpleasant and it was otherwise unappreciated...

> GhostPCL isn't in the Debian archives and I believe the reason might
> be because the GhostPCL build scripts were not designed to allow use
> of system libraries in place of their packaged third party libraries.
> It would be nice to find another alternative, but if nothing efficient
> is available at this point, I've been considering creating alternative
> build scripts that would use system libraries whenever possible. I'm
> pretty sure if alternative build scripts are used, the GhostScript
> project would not want anything to do with support. One would have to
> check for/submit bugs on their official versions. It would at least
> be one alternative for printers that used PCL instead of Postscript.

GhostPCL, GhostScript, and related projects are not named for the
output, but the input: you do not need GhostPCL unless you want to
view PCL files.
GhosScript can output PCL, which is all you need for printing.

GhostPCL was dropped from Debian because it included (and required)
non-free fonts.
Artifex Software (the company that wrote and maintained both) has since
merged it with GhostScript (GhostPDL), though I'm not sure what the
license deal is.

There were a few forks of GhostScript, though AFAICT "Ghost Trap"
is the only active one.

HTH,
Isaac Dunham