Brother (HL-5170DN) Drivers FUBAR?

Question

Level 1

8 points

Brother (HL-5170DN) Drivers FUBAR?

After upgrading to SL. I was no longer able to print to my Brother HL-5170DN. I was using the Brother BR-Script3 driver before the upgrade, but it was no longer available after the upgrade. I have not previously used the CUPS drivers.

I tried the following:
-Reset printing system and re-added printers in System Preferences w/auto driver select: no change.
-Deleted and re-added w/Gutenprint driver: no change.
-Deleted and re-added w/Generic PostScript Printer driver: prints okay.
-Reinstalled Brother BR-Script3 driver (from brxubprt11c.dmg), deleted and re-added the printer using this driver: prints okay.

As far as I can tell, the Brother driver is over 3 years old and only vetted through Tiger but it worked fine under Leopard and seems to work okay under Snow Leopard.

This solves my problem for now, but why don't the supplied CUPS drivers work?

Now I have to try printing to the i860…

Mac OS X (10.6)

Posted on Sep 4, 2009 7:26 PM

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Answer 1

Cohi

Level 1

139 points

Sep 18, 2009 4:23 AM in response to bclabo

Same here with a HL-5170DN; haven't got much time to play with it right now, and the generic PostScript driver works well enough here, too.

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Answer 2

Prof_B

Level 1

4 points

Sep 18, 2009 2:38 PM in response to Cohi

The problem is that brother printers use BR-script and not real PostScript. The CUPs drivers send raw postscript through to any printer they think is a postscript printer in this printer is not. Change the printer driver to one that is listed as using BR-Script. Make sure you set the correct number of input trays and deselect printer harddrives etc. Your HL-5170DN should then work perfectly.

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