Brother HL-2240D does not connect with Xubuntu 20.04

[Liam Proven]

On Fri, 2 Oct 2020 at 21:03, MR ZenWiz <mrzenwiz at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Oct 2, 2020 at 4:57 AM Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> :
> > No, HP's drivers will not help with a Brother.
> >
> Interesting - that's how I had it configured for 18.04 and it was
> working fine.  It was configured as an HP-2140 IIRC.

*Googles* Er, that seems to be a netbook PC, so probably not.

Generic HP drivers are used for tons of printers, yes -- HP Printer
Control Language (PCL) is a very common de facto standard for laser
printers. But HP's own driver package won't talk to anything except an
actual HP device, I think.

If generic PCL drivers work, then those built into CUPS should be fine.

> Yes.  Now that the machine recognizes the printer as there (it wasn't
> showing up on the other USB port), it works great.
>
> Thanks.

You're welcome.

This is a bit worrying, though. "Unplug it and try it in another port"
is a typical Windows troubleshooting step, because Windows stores
("remembers") the association of a particular device and a particular
port.   AFAIK, Linux doesn't. If it's starting to, that's a bad sign,
IMHO.

I blame systemd. I generally do. I am torn on systemd. It's a Red Hat
thing, and Red Hat's stated position for its distros (RHEL, Fedora
_and_ CentOS) is that they don't officially support dual-booting
except installation alongside a single copy of the current version of
Windows -- and not even really that.

Most other distro vendors are more pragmatic and do work alongside
other distros, other OSes and more complex multiboot scenarios. Fedora
& RHEL, nope. Not at all, go away, we're not listening.

I took this up _in person_ with the relevant developers when I worked
at RH, and got told to go away, we won't fix this.

Lots of people don't like RH's attitude. I am one of them. It is part
of the reason I don't work there any more. Ubuntu is generally far
more accomodating and pragmatic, but as Ubuntu adopts more and more RH
components (GNOME 3, Wayland, systemd, etc.) replacing Ubuntu tech
(Unity, Mir, upstart, etc.) then I fear for the future.

I've been experimenting with systemd-free distros recently -- Devuan
and MX Linux. Next I will be back to swearing at FreeBSD. :-(

-- 
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