23 September 2020

Installing a Brother HL-1222WE printer on Linux (Fedora)

I hoped I left printing and wasting paper behind me long ago, but here the COVID quarantine and online school (my daughter is first grade) forced me to buy a printer.

A bit of market research for a home printer pointed me to Brother HL-1222WE, the main pros were:

  • relatively cheap price for a laser printer with wireless connectivity;
  • cheap consumables, replacement toner cartridges are available (and I uderstand you can even refill them yourself);
  • no chip on the cartridge
  • easy to install on Linux (beforehand I read you need some proprietary drivers from the manufacurer)

So, with the printer in hand I connected it (via USB) to my Fedora desktop. It was recognized and the installation went smoothly click-click-click using the available Open Source drivers. Then tried wirelessly on the laptop, equally smooth. Below are a few screenshots for illustrative purpose:

brother printer linux
brother printer linux
brother printer linux
brother printer linux
brother printer linux
brother printer linux

To be fair, you can install the same with a few clicks and available drivers on Windows too. Only for the Android phone I installed some app from the manufacturer.

One thing to note: before installed on my Linux machine, the printer was already installed on a Windows PC, so its wireless setup (picking from a list the access point name) was done there. Not sure if the wizard for wireless setup would include that and I am too lazy to reset the settings only to try it now.

Update: If you think you may need the proprietary drivers for stuff like monitoring the toner level, it is not the case, you can use the web interface:

brother printer linux