Brother HL-L2300D - CUPS shows print jobs complete, nothing gets printed

Question

I'm trying to set up a Raspberry Pi 2B print server for a Brother HL-L2300D printer.

I've done the following:

1. Installed Raspbian (Debian-Stretch-based version)
2. Installed a bunch of packages including cups, samba and foomatic-db
3. foomatic-db didn't have a driver for HL-L2300D, so installed the (proprietary? not sure) driver from here.
4. Executed the Brother driver installer tool; Installation seems to have passed, although I did get some error message about an incompatibility between 386 and x86_64
5. Enabled relevant access in /etc/cups/cupsd.conf
6. Entered the web management interface; the printer was already added.
7. Set the auto-added printer as the default one.
8. Opened a short text file in LeafPad
9. Repeatedly sent the text file to be printed
10. Checked the CUPS logs, including the job log

Result:

• Printer seems to be installed just fine with an appropriately-named PPD
• Nothing gets printed
• The job logs show the jobs as having succeeded

My questions:

• What's failing?
• How do I get the printer to actually print?

Answer 1

While Brother's own drivers can't be used on ARM-based device, there is a FOSS (reverse-engineered?) driver available:

brlaser on GitHub

which works for some Brother printers. It is reported to work with HL-2300D printers too - but not in all cases, or at all times, so YMMV.

It has worked for me though.

Answer 2

An identical issue was addressed on the SX Raspberry Pi community:

Can't get Brother HL-L2300D printer to print from Raspberry Pi

The problem is that the Raspberry Pi is neither x86 nor x86_64, it's an ARM-processor-based architecture. Brother does not offer driver source code nor binaries which could be used for a Pi driver. There appears to be some QEMU-based solution for using 386 print drivers.

Answer 3

Not sure if you ever got yours to work, but it seems there is an ARM driver for the 2300D here. I had it working for my 2320D, duplex and all, but screwed with the settings trying to get it to properly default to Letter (vs A4 paper), and now the duplex won't work. Anyway, might be worth trying.