Brother DCP-1610W on Arch Linux

Published: December 25th 2025 (week 52 of 2025)

DCP-1610W is a printer-scanner combo produced by the Brother company. It is a good choice if you need a reliable black-and-white laser printer that works well on Linux.

The basic prerequisite is, of course, CUPS. The rest of the post assumes you already have CUPS installed. CUPS should be stopped while you are modifying configuration, so it is best to just stop it now before you do anything else:

systemctl stop cups

The post will explicitly state whenever you should run a command, or a series of commands with CUPS running.

The post assumes the printer is connected to your PC with a USB cable, and that your primary user is part of the lp group.

The printer

You need the brlaser driver from AUR. build it with

Build the package with makepkg(8)

makepkg --syncdeps

The --syncdeps flag is there to instruct pacman(8) to install any missing dependencies that are encountered during the build process. Since I build the packages as a non-root user, this fails, and I install the dependencies manually after inspecting them.

Install the package

pacman -U ./brlaser-6.2.8-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst

Start CUPS again now, since we will need to inspect and alter its state.

Check if the driver is available

lpinfo -m | grep -i 1610w

drv:///brlaser.drv/br1610.ppd Brother DCP-1610W series, using Owl-Maintain/brlaser v6.2.8

Check if the device is available

lpinfo -v | grep -i 1610w

direct usb://Brother/DCP-1610W%20series?serial=DEADBEEFC0FFEE1

Version number of the driver may be different, and the serial number of you printer surely will be different; but if everything works, you will get some output from both commands.

Now take the device URI from the lpinfo -v command above and use it to create a "destination" ie, something that you can send print jobs to:

Create CUPS destination

lpadmin -p brother_dcp1610w -v 'usb://Brother/DCP-1610W%20series?serial=DEADBEEFC0FFEE1'

You can also mark the printer as shared:

Mark printer as shared

lpadmin -p brother_dcp1610w -o printer-is-shared=true

This can also be done at the same time the destination is created. The -o just sets an option for the destination.

The default printer

To set a destination as the default printer, use lpadmin(8) with the -d flag:

lpadmin -p brother_dcp1610w -d

You can see what is the current default using lpstat(1):

lpstat -d

The scanner

The DCP-1610W is a neat little device that solves all your black-and-white needs, and combines a printer with a scanner. To use the scanner functionality you will need the brscan-skey and brscan4 packages.

Build and install them, then enable the brscan-skey service:

systemctl enable --now brscan-skey

I use simple-scan from the GNOME project for all my scanning needs.

The printer

The default printer

The scanner

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