Brother, can you scan a dime?

I really like my Brother printers.  I've had only two Brother printers in the past 6+ years, but that's a fraction of the number of HP DeskJet printers I've had in the 4-5 years previous.  For my purposes, they are rock solid and a great bang-for-the-buck especially when it comes to the consumables (i.e. ink or toner).

Last year I started working from home and needed a FAX of some sort.  The Brother MFC-295CN was only $60 on Amazon, and was everything I needed:

• Printer
• Scanner
• FAX
• Network attached

My last HP laserjet cost around $100, and was not network attached (the HP JetDirect box was over $100 separately).  The Brother is a great little device for an all-in-one.

And the best thing??  Brother is very Linux friendly - a big plus in my book.

Right after I got it a year ago (2010), I jumped through some hoops to get the Scan-to-PC feature to work but it was possible.  Recently, I re-installed my workstation with Ubuntu 11.10 and had to re-setup the configuration.

To my plesant suprise, this was extremely easy to setup.  Here's what I did:

• http://welcome.solutions.brother.com/bsc/public_s/id/linux/en/download_scn.html
  • The official Brother drivers.  Get the one that you need for your printer.
• http://welcome.solutions.brother.com/bsc/public_s/id/linux/en/instruction_scn1.html
  • Follow the directions beneath the section where you downloaded the drivers.

Here are my steps that I took to install the Brother scanning software under Ubuntu 11.10.

1. Download the drivers from the Brother website.
2. Install the driver:
   • sudo dpkg -i /home/dan/Downloads/brscan3-0.2.11-4.amd64.deb
3. Configure the driver:
   • brsaneconfig3  -a  name=BrotherScanner model=MFC-295CN ip=192.168.1.15
   • (My printer is at 192.168.1.15)
4. Try a test scan:
   1. For this I used "Simple Scan": Applications -> Graphics -> Simple scan.
   2. I placed a document on the scanner, the clicked the "Scan" button.
   3. After ~20 seconds of thinking, the scanner started working and the document appeared on my screen.

I almost feel silly writing this down - it was the same series of steps I would have had to go through if this was an "easy Windows install".  It was very easy to configure.  Way to go Brother!

Dan