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32-bit drivers? Most laser printer drivers are just a PPD file. You don’t need to install any executables or whatever. Heck, on a lot of printers you can just use Bonjour printing without installing any drivers at all!

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The cheaper Brother printers don’t have a PostScript engine, so you need a “driver” (really a CUPS filter) to rasterize the image and prepend the appropriate PCL commands. In the official Linux driver package, at least for my printer, this comes in the form of a rather complicated shell script that hooks together some binary blobs, and if you don’t have all the right 32-bit support libraries it just mysteriously fails to produce any output while CUPS reports that the print job completed successfully.

Fortunately someone has made an open-source equivalent which is much less complicated and seems to work just fine.

I think brlaser and brscan are the modern replacements.

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