John Bokma's Hacking & Hiking

Setting up a Brother AirPrinter on Ubuntu

September 9, 2026

In the early afternoon I set up a Brother HL-L2350DW AirPrinter on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS as follows.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install cups avahi-daemon
sudo systemctl enable --now cups avahi-daemon

After I had installed the required packages I verified that the Brother laserprinter could be found on the WiFi network:

lpinfo -v | grep -F ipp:
network ipp://Brother%20HL-L2350DW%20series._ipp._tcp.local/

However, when I tried to print a buffer from Emacs I got the following message:

/usr/bin/lpr: Error - No default destination

Checking with lpstat confirmed this: no default destination was set:

printer Brother_HL_L2350DW_series is idle.  enabled since Mon 07 Sep 2026 01:36:35 PM CEST
no system default destination

I used lpadmin to fix this as follows:

sudo lpadmin -d Brother_HL_L2350DW_series

Note how the name must be exactly as reported by lpstat in order for this to work.

Next, I used lpstat again to verify the previous command was successful:

system default destination: Brother_HL_L2350DW_series

Finally, now I could print a buffer from Emacs via WiFi to the Brother HL L2350DW.