Brother HL-2140 laser printer report

[Alan Dayley]

Our five(?) year old Canon i960 inkjet printer had finally gummed up
so bad we have given up on it.  So we went printer shopping this
evening.

We realized we rarely print in color and laser is so much cheaper per
page.  Fry's had the Brother HL-2140 laser printer for $59.  It's a
basic printer with three LEDs, one button and USB only interface
(http://www.frys.com/product/5533900).  Bought one, brought it home,
inserted the toner cartridge, printed a self-test page and went
looking for Linux configuration information.

The page at http://www.openprinting.org/printer/Brother/Brother-HL-2140
was very informative.  The instructions in the last comment of that
page are reproduced here:

1) Plug in the printer to the computer. Ignore all the prompts, hit cancel, etc.
2) Download the LPR and CUPS deb files from this link (or search for
them on the site):
http://solutions.brother.com/linux/en_us/download_prn.html#HL-2140
3) sudo mkdir /usr/share/cups/model
4) sudo dpkg -i --force-all --force-architecture [the two debs you downloaded]
THE FORCE SWITCHES ARE VITAL FOR 64 BIT MACHINES!
5)Profit. The printer should work and show up as "HL2140".

I was installing on a 32-bit Kubuntu 9.04 system.  I did NOT use the
"--force-all --force-architecture" options in step 4 above.  I DID get
great results with the printer working right away!

Slick and smooth.

Then, I used the printer configuration application to click a few
check boxes so that the printer is shared on the local network.  Then
I grabbed my wife's MacBook running OS X 10.something, told it to find
a new network printer, it found the laser printer and I from her
laptop I printed wireless-to-wired-to-LinuxDesktop-to-HL-2140.

Slick and smooth.  Easy configuration and my wife is happy.  I'm happy!

Alan