>Yeah, an i386 driver

To quote from a member of the Debian Printing Team:

...most Brother printers support a standard printer language such as PCL or PostScript...

Thus the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS) should be able to perform printing to most Brother printers without needing to install drivers.

I have a Brother model DCP-7065DN 3-in-1 (Copier, Scanner and Printer), which is does not support a standard printer language, and I therefore need to install a driver.

The printer driver that Brother provide on their website that you may install with their bash script is an i386/32-bit intel driver from 2011. The scanner driver is provided in both 32 and 64 bit versions and they are from 2019. The install script recognises my Ubuntu as a 64-bit OS and installs the 64-bit scanner driver.

In my previous email I stated:

> If I install a new Ubuntu 18.04.3 Mate version on a PC, then Ubuntu's GUI "Add Printer" works fine.

This "Add Printer" GUI utility adds a driver supplied and supported by the Debian Printing Team. On my laptop it will install the 64-bit intel driver for the Brother printer. The driver is called "brlaser v4" and was released in 2018. It ships with ubuntu and other popular distros.

Should you need this special Brother printer driver then to see if its installed on your computer enter the command:

$ dpkg -s printer-driver-brlaser

To install it you can enter the command:

$ sudo apt install printer-driver-brlaser

The ubuntu team build this package for the following platforms: amd64, arm64, armhf, i386, ppc64el, s390x

In summary, if you do need to use this special driver for a Brother printer, then there is no need to use a 32 bit driver on a 64 bit intel based Linux. You can use the 64 bit version that is probably included with your OS distro. However both work, and I haven't been able to observe any difference in the printing. Maybe one prints at an of average of 26ppm and the other at 25ppm, but that's not the sort of thing that I am able to detect.

===

With regard to needing a...

> low-powered arm64 print server

 

I guess a Raspberry Pi model 3B meets the "low-powered arm64" spec. For making the R-Pi3 into a "print server" the Raspbian distro could be used. However it is currently only distributed in AArch32 version. An AArch64 distro that is available for R-Pi3 is the "Ubuntu Server". You can download this arm64 distro image from here.

After booting the R-Pi3, the print server applications are then installed.  Plus, in my case with a DCP-7065DN Brother printer, I used apt to install the printer-driver-brlaser (for AArch64).

After configuring CUPS from a web-browser on a remote PC, I can then spool print jobs to the R-Pi/arm64 print-server and the printout comes out on my Brother printer looking OK.

I notice that next Monday night we have a wlug meeting, so if anyone would like to bring along their printer, then I'll bring my R-Pi3 / arm64 print server and we can see if this print server will support your printer. Please, no printers that only have a parallel port, ...that's pushing the latest technology beyond its limits!

cheers,

Ian.