Installing a printer driver in wine for label printing inside of wine

[Fensterbank]

Hi there,

I now own the Brother VC-500W, it is a color label printer.
I want to design and print labels using P-Touch Editor in my Ubuntu Linux.
The tools and executables have been downloaded from https://www.brother.de/support/vc-500w/downloads

I used PlayOnLinux to successfully install and run P-Touch Editor, but it does mention that it won't work without the driver for the label printer.
The printer is sitting in the WiFi, so there is no USB connection. I think the driver just makes some web requests to get information about the inserted label size and to make the prints. So I think it's right to assume, as soon as I successfully install the driver and P-Touch Editor is happy, it should be able to print.

So at this point I don't want to install my Windows Driver in wine to access it from Linux or something else (most answers I found about topics like these are mentioning CUPS drivers, but my use case is kind of different). The windows app in wine should find the windows printer driver, which then makes some webrequests.

After some configuration and installing missing libraries, I was able to run the installation process.


Unfortunately the installation process aborts with the message

Unable to start Windows Print Spooler service. Installation cannot continue. The Print Spooler service needs to be started for the installation to complete.

Do you have any hints, how or where I can start/install that spooler service to make that driver installation work?
Goal is, that the P-Touch Editor in wine finds and uses the label printer driver.

I appreciate any help.
Thanks!

[fargodwe]

I downloaded the Windows 10 64-bit installer from the site. The installer starts, asks me to connect the printer via USB or manually specify. I selected manually specify and your printer. It then asked what I wanted to install followed by asking for a serial number. I don't have your device so I don't have a serial number to enter.

Could you please post the output of

Code: Select all

egrep -i "name|model|filter" /etc/cups/ppd/*

Then:

Code: Select all

lpstat -t

[fargodwe]

BTW - keep in mind you can't install a Windows driver in wine. wine does some internal things and the end result is that it maps to a linux device, so a linux driver is needed. The Brother support site for your printer does not show linux as a supported OS.

[Fensterbank]

Hi fargodwe,

thank you for your reply.

Could you please post the output of

Code: Select all

egrep -i "name|model|filter" /etc/cups/ppd/*

Then:

Code: Select all

lpstat -t

I don't have cups installed I think, so I'll get an error message here.
The last 9 digits of my serial number are C0Y143006. (I don't think, this is a secret key… It's weird, it is necessary for driver installation. )

BTW - keep in mind you can't install a Windows driver in wine. wine does some internal things and the end result is that it maps to a linux device, so a linux driver is needed. The Brother support site for your printer does not show linux as a supported OS.

Yes, as I mentioned I don't want to map anything. I don't want a printer from my linux in Wine and I don't want that driver from Wine in my Linux machine.
The printer is in infrastructure mode in my network and has an IP adress, I believe printing is only happening by sending some POST requests around, so that "printer driver" is only a tool that does these web requests and therefore I hoped, it is easy usable in Wine.
For example, there is a linux CLI for some similar printer models (https://github.com/clarkewd/ptouch-print), so it's just network traffic happening for printing.
Since I wanted to use the P-Touch Editor for label design and printing, I have to use the official driver.

PS:
In the meantime I installed a Windows 10 in VirtualBox just for that tool, so I don't have to log of and boot my Windows installation.
So if we don't find a solution or if you don't want to put further energy in helping here, it would be absolutely fine.

[fargodwe]

You're going to be out of luck if you don't understand that wine internally maps devices to the linux device. It's how it works. https://askubuntu.com/questions/743837/ ... r-on-linux. As for networked printers afaik they still need a driver in Linux itself.

[fargodwe]

Oops - duplicate content.