What it says on the tin, in case it can be helpful to anyone.

After years of suffering with an inkjet printer, where ink would always dry, or print heads clog, or whatever, making it unusable, I’ve finally accepted the harsh reality that all I needed was a Brother laser printer. I’ve found a decently priced LED laser printer in the DCP L3520CDW model ^[1], with good resolution for black and white prints, and decent resolution for color prints.

To install it on Linux (well, ArchLinux, by the way), I’ve installed the CUPS server first:

sudo pacman -S cups

Then, I’ve moved over to the Web service page to configure it, on http://localhost:631/admin, where I’ve had to fill in my (Linux) username and password.

Then, I’ve clicked Add Printer, and despite the printer being automatically found by CUPS, I’ve had to use another way:

• select the discovered printer first, click Continue
• copy the connection URL. For me, it was lpd://BRW046874F1C81D/BINARY\_P1
• get back to the previous screen where I could select the discovered printer, or other option
• select Internet Printing Protocol (ipp) in the list of Other Network Printers options
• strip the BINARY_P1 suffix from the connection URL, and use the ipp:// protocol instead of lpd://, then fill that in the Connection field. For me, it meant filling ipp://BRW046874F1C81D.
• click continue, and you’re done!

Thanks to this ArchLinux forum post for the trick to use a manual IPP connection instead of the auto-discovered LPD protocol (which would only print garbage, when configured with LPD). It took me way too long to realize the difference in the connection URLs, so I hope this post clarifies it a bit!

1. It’s surprisingly hard to find an English-speaking store page, so all I could find on the dot com website was the support page. ↩