Good morniing. Since installing fedora 42 printers are no longer recognised. I dual boot with Linux Mint, and there is no problem with the latter, but I simply can’t get printers to show up on Fedora. It is a Brother printer that has worked well in the past.
Ironically, I changed to Fedora from Mint a couple of years ago when I was also having printer problems. I got so frustrated that I decided to try several other types of Linux and use the first that would recognise a printer. Fedora won, so it is odd that I am having so much difficulty now.
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Most Brother printers require drivers for Linux
Have you been into CUPS and attempted to configure the printer? It should ask you to choose a driver and you will then find out if Fedora has the required driver. I not you can download the driver from Brother and install it.
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Fedora 42 recognized my HP printer automatically and picked up my Canon printer when I ran the rpm file that I downloaded from Canon. I did have to change the paper size from A4 to Letter for the Canon, but everything is humming along nicely now.
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thank you for the replies. In fact, Brother does not require drivers, and I have used it ‘driverless’ for some time. Giving in to my frustration, I removed Linux Mint and have only fedora. It now automatically recognises the printer (as well as another I use) but when I go to print, it doesn’t show up in the printer list.
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Which brother printer are you using ?
Normally just plugging in to the linux box the printers are seen and installed automatically as you discovered in Linux mint
I found i needed a restart afterwards for it to appear on the list, even though it printed immediately
Brother do offer drivers
Select your country or region and then printer
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Last time I distrohopped - I sat on Fedora (39 or 40 or something?) for about 6 weeks - but that whole “RPMFusion” repo started giving me the irrits (irritation)… Don’t remember now (it was over 2 years ago) how well printing worked… Or even if I tried printing from Fedora…
So - I’ve been mostly on Pop!_OS on my desktop machine (Ryzen 7) and my Linux laptop (ThinkPad E495 with Ryzen 5) - and my printer is a Brother (MFC circa 2015)… It just works… I don’t have to do anything… Even though it’s an MFC - I only use it as printer from Linux… I use the MFC features via FTP to my NAS…
I do support some “legacy” Brother MFC devices for one of my customers, through CUPS - Brother only supplies and distributes 32 bit (i386) drivers for RPM based distros… The CUPS servers I support are running Oracle Linux 7 - and when I have to patch them - I have to temporarily disable i386 support - then - re-enable the 32 bit libraries - it’s a PITA…
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So your drivers must be present in the distro.
My Brother MFC is an earlier model… I always have to install drivers.
If @ljohn has a new Brother printer, it is most likely driverless
My understanding is that with driverless printing the printer supplies a driver ( ie a PPD file) to Linux, so it is not really driverless, the printer supplies its own driver.
Not sure what year driverless printing arrived… I guess around 2020
If @ljohn has a driverless printer, and it does not work, that is a distro fault… report the bug .
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A brief update. I really prefer Fedora in most respects to Linux Mint. However I have been defeated on this occasion despite all my efforts. I started with a clean slate and downloaded Fedora 42 on its own, but no printers were recognised, as they have been in the past. So I then installed Linux Mint 22.1 over Fedora, and the printers simply showed up automatically which is what used to happen with fedora.
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You need to do some investigating. If you keep switching distros you will never find out what the fault is.
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I just installed Fedora 42. It immediately found and installed my HP 4520. It found my Canon 4450 and asked for a driver. I pulled the file from Canon.com, selected the 64-bit rpm file, and installed it using Discover. Both printers are functioning normally; elapsed time under 10 minutes.
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