Need help getting Brother MFC-5460CN scanner to work with Ubuntu Hardy 64AMD

September 24, 2008 7:57 AM

Need help getting Brother MFC-5460CN scanner to work with Ubuntu Hardy 64AMD. Oh, and I'm really tech challenged, so a step-by-step would help.

I've tried Googling and reading various fora, and I still can't get this SOB to work. I can get the printer part working, just not scanning.

I've tried this. And this.

When I open XSane, I have the scanner as an available device, but when I select it, I get this error: Failed to open device 'brother2:bus6;dev2': Error during device I/O

I can get around with sudo commands and such, but I am at the end of my fooling-around-on-my-own rope, so I come to you, the AskMefi community (who I find less intimidating than the various linux/ubuntu forums) for your assistance!

posted by macadamiaranch to computers & internet (8 comments total)

PS -- my computer is a Dell XPS M1330, and my OS is Ubuntu 8.04
posted by macadamiaranch at 7:58 AM on September 24, 2008

What happened after you tried this?
posted by flabdablet at 8:27 AM on September 24, 2008

Something else that will probably help is opening a Terminal window and running the following command:

sudo sane-find-scanner
posted by flabdablet at 8:41 AM on September 24, 2008

For what it's worth, I'm thinking your scanner device is getting the wrong permissions applied to it. sane-find-scanner will track down what file under /dev is used to get to your scanner, after which assorted methods can be tried to set the permissions properly on that device.

If the device turns out to be one that's built dynamically by udev when the scanner gets plugged in, that will probably involve some editing of the udev rules, perhaps slightly differently to that described in the Brother post you linked to. If not, we should be able to just set the permissions by hand and have them stick.
posted by flabdablet at 8:46 AM on September 24, 2008

Hi. Well, I tried the first thing you linked to again, and it ended up making the scanner work, but now it won't print!!! I get a "the device may be unplugged" pop up.

Running sudo sane-find-scanner returns an error message of "command not found." I also ran sudo xsane-find-scanner for kicks and got the same result.

So now, the scanner works in XSane, but printing doesn't work. Thanks for your help so far!
posted by macadamiaranch at 5:47 PM on September 24, 2008

You should be able to make sane-find-scanner available using

sudo apt-get install sane-utils
posted by flabdablet at 9:44 PM on September 24, 2008

I dumped 64bit Ubuntu over exactly this, same printer, and some other issues that were handled better in the 32bit version.
posted by Goofyy at 9:52 AM on September 25, 2008

What ended up working (after HOURS of trying stuff) was making it a network printer, and then following the directions for making the scanner work by following the directions on this page.
posted by macadamiaranch at 11:55 AM on September 27, 2008