Problems Installing a Brother Printer

Support and Help
1

Hello,
I am running Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and trying to connect Brother Printer MFC-J450DW.

From the Brother site,I located and downloaded the proper driver install tool and went into the terminal to install it.

I get as far as,“Print a Test Page?” I give it a,“y” prompt,enter,and instead of printing a test page,it gives me this terminal readout:

" wget -T 10 -nd --no-cache https://download.brother.com/pub/com/linux/linux/packages/brscan-skey-0.3.2-0.amd64.deb

–2025-11-04 12:47:36-- https://download.brother.com/pub/com/linux/linux/packages/brscan-skey-0.3.2-0.amd64.deb

Resolving download.brother.com (download.brother.com)… 96.17.83.78

Connecting to download.brother.com (download.brother.com)|96.17.83.78|:443… connected.

HTTP request sent, awaiting response… 200 OK

Length: 73934 (72K) [text/plain]

Saving to: ‘brscan-skey-0.3.2-0.amd64.deb’

brscan-skey-0.3.2-0 100%[===================>] 72.20K --.-KB/s in 0.07s

2025-11-04 12:47:36 (963 KB/s) - ‘brscan-skey-0.3.2-0.amd64.deb’ saved [73934/73934]

dpkg -i --force-all brscan-skey-0.3.2-0.amd64.deb

Selecting previously unselected package brscan-skey.

(Reading database … 193956 files and directories currently installed.)

Preparing to unpack brscan-skey-0.3.2-0.amd64.deb …

Unpacking brscan-skey (0.3.2-0) …

dpkg: brscan-skey: dependency problems, but configuring anyway as you requested:

brscan-skey depends on libsane (>= 1.0.11-3); however:

Package libsane is not installed.

Setting up brscan-skey (0.3.2-0) …

apt-get install libusb-0.1-4

Reading package lists… Done

Building dependency tree… Done

Reading state information… Done

You might want to run ‘apt --fix-broken install’ to correct these.

The following packages have unmet dependencies:

brscan-skey : Depends: libsane (>= 1.0.11-3) but it is not installable

E: Unmet dependencies. Try ‘apt --fix-broken install’ with no packages (or speci a solution).
wbee@wbee-HP-ProDesk-600-G5-Desktop-Mini:~/Downloads$ "

That returned this"
"wbee@wbee-HP-ProDesk-600-G5-Desktop-Mini:~$ apt --fix-broken install
E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend - open (13: Permission denied)
E: Unable to acquire the dpkg frontend lock (/var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend), are you root?
wbee@wbee-HP-ProDesk-600-G5-Desktop-Mini:~$ "

I’m at a loss. What should I try next?

Thank you.

In the upper right hand corner of my desktop,instead, I got a red circle with a horizontal white line through it. It prompted me to run apt-get in the terminal,which I did,and it returned this:

"wbee@wbee-HP-ProDesk-600-G5-Desktop-Mini:~$ apt-get
apt 2.8.3 (amd64)
Usage: apt-get [options] command
apt-get [options] install|remove pkg1 [pkg2 …]
apt-get [options] source pkg1 [pkg2 …]

apt-get is a command line interface for retrieval of packages
and information about them from authenticated sources and
for installation, upgrade and removal of packages together
with their dependencies.

Most used commands:
update - Retrieve new lists of packages
upgrade - Perform an upgrade"

1 Like
2

For installing the Brother printer …

You might want to review the early part of the discussion in the following:


If you have an old printer for which the definition seems to hang around like a zombie, you might want to again look further down in that same discussion, starting at the below, on some strategies to purge all references to that zombie printer:

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@ebrid001 Welcome to Ubuntu Discourse :slight_smile:

Next time you post terminal output, please wrap with code tags for easier reading and analysis.

There are 3 ways you can do this.

  1. some text here using backticks before and after the text
  2. highlighting the text and clicking on the </> icon in the composer
  3. Highlighting the text and using Ctrl+E on the keyboard

Thanks!

2 Likes
5

I have two different Brother printers and with neither one have I had to download a driver. It was automatically installed. Printers are now driverless.
I did have issue with first one creating 3 printers and defaulting to one that did not work, as it was configures just as a pass thru device. Once I set correct printer it has worked without issue.
My second printer I orginally configured with wired Internet, but then switched to WiFi. WiFi did not want to work until I totally uninstalled the Internet configuration.

Driverless printing.
https://wiki.debian.org/CUPSDriverlessPrinting

All these correctly show my Brother printer
lpstat -t
driverless
ll /etc/cups/ppd/ # that is el el not cap I nor 1

3 Likes
6

While, on the whole, that may be true for most brands, it is not true for any UFR II based Canon printer.

A Manufacturer-supplied driver is still the only way to make the Canon ImageCLASS MF3010 All-in-One printer function properly for both printing and scanning, because the UFR II protocol is proprietary (not open-source).

Before buying a printer, Users should verify the actual state of support for the intended printer model.

1 Like
7

Thank you all. I’ll climb back in when time permits.

1 Like
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I also made a mistake by downloading the proprietary drivers from Brother’s site. The driver installation script also did something odd and installed a file (version of the driver) I couldn’t locate in their repositories or anywhere else. In any case, their scanner drivers only cause problems. From what I understand, the proprietary USB scanner driver conflicts with ipp-usb, and their eSCL drivers are unreliable (they disappear when the device goes to sleep). They’re also redundant, because the built-in sane-airscan driver is reliable and works properly.

I didn’t see any point in keeping the Brother drivers installed, so I removed them. I did keep brscan-skey, because it may be required for the physical “scan to computer” button to function.

Edit:
I forgot to mention that printing over USB does require Brother’s proprietary driver, although, it’s hard for me to imagine a situation where network printing wouldn’t be possible. Maybe an offline DB used to store financial or classified data, or similar.

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