Installing a CUPS driver for Brother DCP-T425W printer

hi all,

this isn't a question rather a workaround I figured out for installing a CUPS driver for my Brother DCP-T425W printer and thought this might help others having the same or similar issues.

I'm running macOS 13 Ventura on a M1 Macbook Air.

Generally Brother recommends using the iPrint&Scan app from the App store. It works fine for me but the problem is you can only print from PDF or photos, so one would have to export a PDF every time you want to print a document and then use iPrint... kinda annoying for a simple task if you ask me.

I found this older post leading to the direction for CUPS (there was also a suggestion there installing an alternative Brother driver for a printer but I didn't feel comfortable doing that althought it did work for some)

Do you have driver for DCP-T420W Brother … - Apple Community

I only semi-know what I'm doing so feel free to correct me :)

My solution:

1) enable CUPS in Terminal

cupsctl WebInterface=yes

once enabled you can access CUPS web interface at:

http://localhost:631

2) download Brother's Linux driver which uses CUPS

for my DCP-T425W printer I downloaded the .deb version

https://support.brother.com/g/b/downloadtop.aspx?c=eu_ot&lang=en&prod=dcpt425w_eu_cn

3) unpack the .deb package

navigate to the file's location in Terminal then unpack the .deb package

ar -x <your filename>

you'll end up with two .tar.gz which you can extract from finder

4) install printer from CUPS web interface

navigate to Administration > Printers > Add Printer

my printer was already set up for my local network so CUPS instantly found my printer

when the setup wizzard asks for the Make choose the Or Provide a PPD File option and navigate to the PPD file located in the extracted .deb package

for my printer it was located in

data/opt/brother/Printers/dcpt425w/cupswrapper/

5) copy files to folder

once CUPS setup was finished it complained that it could not find the PPD files at

/usr/libexec/cups/filter 

so I ended up copying all three files from the cupswrapper folder to the location above

(If you're using Finder you may need to enable showing hidden files and folders by pressing Cmd + Shift + . )

6) change file ownership to root

After the previous step CUPS complained again about the file's permission not being secure, so the solution that worked for me was to change brother_lpdwrapper_dcpt425w 's ownership to root

sudo chown root <filename>

That's it! Now my printer appears in System Settings > Printers & Scanners and I can finally print directly from TextEdit/ Word or any application.

Hope this helps for others.