Bubba2 as print server: Brother printers

[jws]

I would like to use my Bubba2 as a print server for the home. My printer is a Brother HL2030 (very similar to many other black-and-white Brother laser printers). Brother provides a "driver" (basically, a program that translates PostScript into "Brother printer language") for Linux. Unfortunately it is a closed-source binary, which only runs on i386 machines, not on Bubba2 which is a PowerPC.

Does anyone know a trick? The client machines in the home are all i386. I suppose it should be possible to do the translation to Brother language on the client machines, and then have the Bubba2 relay the data to the printer. Then all 3 client computers could print, apart from the Bubba2 itself. But it would be more elegant to have the Bubba2 doing the translation.

[asparak]

Hi There,

Lots of people having exactly the same issue with Brother printers, both here and on the OpenPrinting forum. Unfortunately Brother have not yet agreed to release their driver files so that they can be recompiled in PPC format and claim to have tried to do it themselves but failed.

Couple of people have tried reverse engineering the i386 file, but get compiler errors because of some missing Brother DLL files.

I'm actively looking for a solution for another model of printer, so will let you know if I find a solution.

[jws]

Hi There,

Lots of people having exactly the same issue with Brother printers [..]
I'm actively looking for a solution for another model of printer, so will let you know if I find a solution.

Thanks much. I hope you find something. In the meantime the solution I mentioned in my previous post works; all 3 workstations can now use Bubba2 as a print server for the Brother HL2030. The only computer that cannot print is Bubba2 itself..

Regards, Jan