nixos custom ppd printer

I have bought a Brother MFC-L3780CDW printer, and needed to get it working on NixOS.

While NixOS supports many Brother printers out of the box, I was unable to get the colour & duplex printing working together with any of the ones I tried.

In the past I’ve used a Brother supplied .deb package on Debian based systems.

This post describes how to install a PPD driver for this printer, but you can use this procedure with other printers.

the PPD #

Brother provides driver packages for Debian and RedHat based systems. You need to download the driver package from the Brother Downloads page. You can find it by searching for your printer, then follow the Download link.

The Brother MFC-L3780CDW link takes me here…

https://support.brother.com/g/b/downloadlist.aspx?c=ca&lang=en&prod=mfcl3780cdw_us_as&os=128

Following the “Linux printer driver” link provides mfcl3780cdwpdrv-3.5.1-1.i386.deb.

Within the deb you will find the PPD file.

1❯ dpkg-deb -c ~/Downloads/brother/3780cdw/mfcl3780cdwpdrv-3.5.1-1.i386.deb | grep ppd
2-rwxr-xr-x root/root     22956 2021-12-22 21:52 ./opt/brother/Printers/mfcl3780cdw/cupswrapper/brother_mfcl3780cdw_printer_en.ppd

If you don’t have dpkg-deb you can run it with nix run "nixpkgs#dpkg-deb" -- ....

To extract the files in the deb:

1❯ dpkg-deb -x mfcl3780cdwpdrv-3.5.1-1.i386.deb mfcl3780cdwp

configure.nix #

I assume you have captured your nixos configuration in a git repo. Place the .PPD from the .deb inside your git repo.

You should have services.printing enabled, we now have to add the PPD into it.

1  services.printing = {
2    enable = true;
3    browsed.enable = true;
4    drivers = [
5      (pkgs.writeTextDir "share/cups/model/brother_mfcl3780cdw_printer_en.ppd"
6        (builtins.readFile external/brother_mfcl3780cdw_printer_en.ppd))
7    ];
8  };

Above, the “share/cups/…” path is where the PPD will be placed, while the “external/…” path is where the PPD will be found, relative to the flake.nix.

Don’t forget to git add the .ppd file.

deploy #

Next you will run nixos-rebuild switch as usual.

The printer driver should now be available in the CUPS GUIs.

I used http://127.0.0.1:631/ to add my printer, but KDE/GNOME/etc settings panel should work as well.