I have an old article about installing the scanner driver for our Brother MFC 8840D Fax/Scanner/Copier/Printer.  That was when things were simpler.  Brother hasn’t kept up to date on their drivers, so I am updating this article.

Downloading

I downloaded the driver from Brother’s Website.  Mine uses the brscan driver, not the brscan2.  You can tell which one to use based on the model number listed on the download page.

Installing

I tried to install with the Ubuntu Software Center.  It gives you some error messages when you do that.  The official instructions say that you are supposed to install it like this:

sudo dpkg --force-all -i brscan-0.2.4-0.amd64.deb

I added my printer using this command:

brsaneconfig -a name=BrotherScanner model="MFC-8840D" ip=192.168.168.168

To make sure that it installed, look at the bottom of the output of this command:

brsaneconfig -q

Now, after all of that, it wouldn’t work.  Come to find out, it puts the library files in the wrong directory.  Thanks to Chargen, I found an easy fix:

for driver in /usr/lib64/sane/*; do sudo ln -s $driver /usr/lib/sane/$(basename $driver); done

And, run this one, too.

for lib in /usr/lib64/libbrscandec.so*; do sudo ln -s $lib /usr/lib/$(basename $lib); done

That fixed the problem!

Resources

• chargen 19/tcp: How to install a Brother brscan scanner in Ubuntu 11.10 (oneiric 64-bit)