When I had Ubuntu 8.04, I’d struggled my way through installing the official Brother driver from the Brother Linux site.
Since then I’ve upgraded a couple of times to 9.10, and had not reinstalled my printer. It turns out Ubuntu has made life much easier for us Brother printer owners - so these days there’s no reason not to install the printer driver, especially if the printer is networked.
Here’s how to do it:
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Open Synaptic Package Manager
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Search for 9840. You should see two packages:
brother-cups-wrapper-ac brother-lpr-driver-ac -
Select those for installation (along with their required packages).
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Go to System->Administration->Printing and press the “New Printer” button.
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After a “Search for new printers” message comes up and goes away, expand “Network Printers”.
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If you’re lucky like me, you’ll see your printer there. I chose to use the one that was found by IP address (LPD Network Printer via DNS-SD).
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Then I printed a test page, which shot a bunch of colour toner out. (If I had to do it over again, I would have just printed from Firefox to save toner.)
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Finally, I did System->Preferences->Default Printer to set the new printer as the default.
That does the printer; next you’ll want the scanner. This isn’t quite as straightforward, since the scanner stuff isn’t in Synaptic. Again I’m assuming it’s set up on a network:
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Make sure you’ve already installed xsane and its requirements.
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Download the .deb for brscan3 from the Brother web site. If you’re like me, you want the 32-bit version.
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Install the driver with:
$ sudo dpkg -i --force-all brscan3-0.2.11-2.i386.deb -
Configure the scanner:
$ brsaneconfig3 -a name=SCANNER model=MFC-9840CDW ip=aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd(where aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd is your MFC-9840’s IP address).
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Verify the driver installed:
$ brsaneconfig3 -q | grep SCANNER 0 SCANNER "MFC-9840CDW" I:aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd -
Run xsane and it should find the scanner.