Brother HL-2240D does not connect with Xubuntu 20.04

[MR ZenWiz]

On Fri, Oct 2, 2020 at 1:08 PM Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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.
>
This was all on my desktop - not sure what the reference here is...

> 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.
>
I had a note in the file I use to track my configuration, and it said
I was using an HP driver - forgot which one.  I thought that odd
because for 18.04 I installed the Brother printer driver file (which I
also no longer have - foo).

> > 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'm not sure.  My Netgear WiFi USB device kind of gave out entirely -
don't know if it was a hardware issue (Netgear says not since the
system does list the device and Windows recognizes it) or a 20.04
incompatibility.

However, the USB ports I was using ewre ports 0 and 1 on that line,
and I moved the Brother plug to the next line over when it started
working.  I wonder if there was some hardware issue with my M/B.  The
M/B NIC port failed when I moved a few months ago, then began working
again after the Netgear WiFi died.  Is there a connection there?  I
can't see how.

FTR, I used a different, heavier ethernet cable this time.  I was able
to get the older one to work with other machines.  Could be my
hardware is getting tired - it's about 10 years old IIRC.

> 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.
>
I'm not fond of systemd either.  I had to use it two jobs back to
manage RHEL 7 systems - what a pain.

Thanks for all the info.  It's always good to keep up on what's what,
and I've been quite lazy lately - not a good practice.

Cheers!

Mark