Brother QL-570 and Linux

Apr 4, 2013

Warning: This post was written 4279 days ago, and may contain incorrect information, outdated opinions, and incorrect language due to my age at the time. Opinions in this post are not representative of who I am as a person today.

A few days ago I picked up a Brother QL-570 (archive.org) cheap on Amazon for the other half, as shes about to setup her own online shop and needs to throw out a few address labels. While I did check up online that it was supported on Linux I didn’t really look into how well its supported, and unfortunantly its not good.

Brother have released a driver set for the device, but it does have quite a few issues that present massive stumbling blocks. The deb packages seem to be setup for Ubuntu only, and die horribly when installed in Debian due to CUPS using a init file of “cups” instead of “cupsys”. A hacky way around it (archive.org) does exist, but honestly this is more poking than should be done for a simple deb package.

It seems that the driver has a few issues regarding configuration settings, define too many in CUPS and processor tool Brother includes segfaults, a fix (archive.org) does exist but a general lack of interest in this issue seems to perpetuate this error, even when a patch is available to resolve the issue. The driver has gone unchanged in Ubuntu and Debian for many years now.

Thankfully, it seems that Linux isn’t the only one affected by this issue. After several hours of frustration trying to get the device to work I gave up and setup the printer in CUPS as a raw printer, allowing my Windows PCs to use it with the official drivers, only for it to happen again…

So, why the post? Well if you’re looking for a Linux compatible label printer i’d advise to stay away from Brother’s offering. Mine works at the moment, but its doing what I really wanted it to do.