Brother HL-2250DN and Linux

By Abhijit Menon-Sen <>

My mother has been using my old Lexmark printer for many years, but it is no longer possible to find toner cartridges for it (which is such a shame, because it's a good printer). When the last cartridge became so flaky that she could no longer print her tickets, she asked me to find a new printer for her.

I thought about a cheap Samsung ML-16xx laser printer, but my recent experience with SPL led me to settle on the Brother HL-2250DN instead. This printer ticks many of my boxes: it has Ethernet support, automatic duplex printing (surprising, for a relatively inexpensive printer), and a proper output tray. The downside is that it supports only PCL6, not PostScript.

It was easy to set up the printer under Ubuntu 11.10. I chose the generic PCL6 printer driver, and everything just worked. Delightful. (Brother's web site does have some CUPS drivers for Linux, but I did not bother to try them out.)

Not surprisingly, the printed output looks fine too.