Brother MFC-J650DW

This is a brief tutorial to make the Brother MFC-J650DW printer work on Arch. It is largely a duplicate of the tutorial for the Brother DCP-7065DN.

Printer

Download Printer drivers

If you previously tried to install the printer in CUPS, remove it.

Install the necessary dependancies: cups, ghostscript, gsfonts.

Then create a temporary directory. Then you must download the official LPR drivers from the Brother website into that directory. Click here (and agree to their terms). This is an RPM archive. You have to download the cupswrapper file here (and agree to their terms). This script creates the filters and PPD file for CUPS automatically. It's an RPM archive too.

Extracting the RPM files

Now you need a small script called rpmextract which allows you to get the files included in the RPM you have just downloaded.

Extract both RPM files:

$ rpmextract.sh mfcj650dwlpr-3.0.0-1.i386.rpm
$ rpmextract.sh mfcj650dwcupswrapper-3.0.0-1.i386.rpm

It should give you two directories: usr and opt.

Editing files to make it work with Arch

Arch Linux uses its own file system organization, so you have to edit some files. Use your text editor (i.e. vi) to open the file named cupswrappermfcj650dw If you created the temporary directory "tmp" in your home, this file will be in /home/<user>/tmp/opt/brother/Printers/mfcj650dw/cupswrapper/cupswrappermfcj650dw

In this file, you must replace all the

if [ -e /etc/init.d/cups ]; then
  /etc/init.d/cups restart
fi
if [ -e /etc/init.d/cupsys ]; then
  /etc/init.d/cupsys restart
fi

occurrences with

systemctl restart org.cups.cupsd

Once you have finished this step, copy all of the files to their corresponding directories in your file system :

# cp -r /home/<user>/tmp/usr/* /usr
# cp -r /home/<user>/tmp/opt/* /opt

Installing the driver and printer

Go into /opt/brother/Printers/mfcj650dw/cupswrapper/ and run the cupswrappermfcj650dw file as root:

# cd /opt/brother/Printers/mfcj650dw/cupswrapper/
# ./cupswrappermfcj650dw

It will restart the cups daemon a couple times if it's already running.

Configure the Connection

Last step!

Now go to the CUPS page: http://localhost:631/

Under the Printers tab you should see a MFCJ650DW printer automatically installed and configured. The connection should be something like usb:/dev/usb/lp0

Click the printers name MFCJ650DW and in the administration drop down choose "Modify Printer"

Select "LPD/LPR Host or Printer". The next page prompts for the connection string and enter: lpd://<Your Printers IP Address>/binary_p1

And that's it. Check out pages for similar printers for Scanner setup.