Brother DCP-J772DW Printer and FreeBSD

[blackhaz]

Brother provides no FreeBSD drivers for their new DCP printers, so I've just managed to successfully adapt their Linux driver to work with FreeBSD CUPS and Wi-Fi connection.

HOWTO

1. Download the modified driver: http://trafyx.com/brother-dcpj772dw/brother-dcpj772dw.tgz
2. Extract to the root directory. This will create /opt with driver files and directories inside. That's the default location of a Linux driver. I think a Linux binary is looking for files there. It may be possible to place the driver in a different location, however, I haven't experimented with this yet.
3. Run /opt/brother/Printers/dcpj772dw/cupswrapper/cupswrapperdcpj772dw. This will place ppd files in the right directories and will link the CUPS filter to your /usr/local/libexec/cups/filter directory.
4. Install the printer in CUPS as usual. Point to the PPD file included in the archive. Use the LPD method to connect to the printer.

CHANGES

The following changes were made to the Linux driver that Brother distributes on their web site:

• Rewrote directories, e.g.: /usr/share became /usr/local/share.
• Corrected FreeBSD CUPS filter path to /usr/local/libexec/cups/filter.
• Corrected CUPS restart via service cupsd restart instead of Linux init script.

Please note it is important for the files in /opt to be owned by root/wheel with permissions set to 755. Otherwise CUPS will complain on insecure permissions and will not run the filter.

The same steps should be applicable to Brother drivers for many other models.

Happy Printing!