Ubuntu – After upgrading to 12.04 the scanner from Brother Printer MFC-290C does not work

Updated answer for January 2019

There is a new single deb installer package on the Brother website that installs both printer and scanner drivers. This makes installation much easier.

1. Download the 'Driver install tool`.
2. Open bash terminal and navigate to download folder.

3. Unzip the file...

   gunzip linux-brprinter-installer-2.2.1-1.gz
   

(version number will probably change, so watch for that).

4. Change to superuser or use sudo for the following commands:

   bash linux-brprinter-installer-*.*.*-* MFC-J825DW
   

5. Agree to prompts and select to use ip address (11 or I when I did it) , then enter the printers ip address when prompted. You can find the address on the printers touch screen display from the 'network' menu if you don't know it.

Old answer, which concerned what to do if you entered the wrong IP address, however it is probably outdated and I suggest trying to rerun the Driver install tool and re-entering the ip address again when prompted.

I think this is a case of only being stuck until you ask for help. Soon after posting this I decided to check the ip addesses of the printer and scanner. Sure enough I'd entered a different ip for each one somehow. Since the printer worked and the scanner didn't, I made the assumption that the scanner had the wrong one.

To correct this I had to enter the following line at the command prompt:

brsaneconfig4 -r SCANNER

This command removed the scanner with the incorrect ip address. Then I simply added it back again, making sure the ip address was right this time.

brsaneconfig4 -a name=SCANNER model=MFC-J825DW ip=192.168.3.3

Note: You should probably set the scanner up to a fixed ip in the router, otherwise you may have problems later on when it gets assigned a different ip when the router is reset.

After I update to 13.10 I got the same error when scanning. There are two problems here.

1. The error Invalid argument is not a argument problem, but is a write access problem.
2. The other problem is that the bus and dev number are wrong from the scanimage error.

How to find and fix the problem?

Install the brscan4 drivers from the brother website

sudo dpkg -i brscan4-0.4.2-1.amd64.deb

Check to see if it works

sudo brsaneconfig4 -d

Test to see if the scanner is installed (scanner need to be powered on). And run as a user NOT root

$ scanimage -L
device `brother4:bus5;dev1' is a Brother ADS-2000 USB scanner
$ scanimage --test
scanimage: open of device brother4:bus5;dev1 failed:
Invalid argument

or

$ scanimage
scanimage: open of device brother4:bus5;dev1 failed:
Invalid argument

You can use the following script to update the permissions for the scanner.

lsusb | grep -i brother | sed 's/://' | awk '{printf "/dev/bus/usb/%s/%s", $2,$4}' | xargs -i -t sudo chmod 666 "{}"

lsusb lists usb devices

grep -i brother will find the brother device (assumption I made is you have only one brother device connected to the USBs at a time)

sed 's/://' | awk '{printf "/dev/bus/usb/%s/%s", $2,$4}' will find the bus & device numbers

xargs -i -t sudo chmod 666 "{}" will add write permission to scanner

Here is more detailed information on why we did what we did above

To find out where the brother scanner is on the bus use lsusb. This is one of the problems in the scanimage. The bus is 003 and the device is 002 and not bus 5, dev 1 as per scanimage

$ lsusb
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 04f9:60a0 Brother Industries, Ltd**  
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
...

To fix the problem, you will need to use the path based on the location of the brother scanner in the lsusb command. In my case it was bus 003 and device 002. Note that if you unplug the USB cable to the scanner and plug it back in the device, you will get a new number and/or bus. (The number return back to 2 when you reboot the PC)

Examples:

sudo cd /dev/bus/usb/003
sudo chmod 666 002

or just:

sudo chmod 666 /dev/bus/usb/003/002

Scanimage need to fix the message when it can not access the scanner to have the right bus and dev number and also tell the user that the problem is a write access problem.

Brother needs to update the driver code so that global user can write to the scanner i.e. chmod 666 to the scanner driver location