Brother HL-5250DN duplex printing: loves me, loves me not, ...

[Michael Hannon]

Greetings.  I've got a brother HL-5250DN printer on my local network, and it
is *currently* not doing duplex printing under Fedora 20.

I've seen discussions of a similar problem in various places.  The responses to
the problem seem to fall into several categories:

(1) Duplex printing must be *enabled* on the printer before it will print
duplex.

(2) Some printers are not well-supported under linux.  You should check the
Open Printing database (or similar).

(3) Get the printer driver from Brother.

Regarding (1), the duplex option *is* enabled on the printer, and it *does*
print in duplex from Windows and Mac systems (and others -- see below).

Regarding (2), the printer printed in duplex just fine through various
versions of Fedora, up through Fedora 18 (the last version I had installed
prior to Fedora 20).  Furthermore, it prints duplex just fine from an Ubuntu
14.04 system that I have running in VirtualBox on my Fedora machine.  In all
cases the duplex printing capability happened without my having to expend any
brain power at all on the issue: it "just worked".

Regarding (3), I've tried that, but it didn't appear to help.

So far as I can tell, my problems are pretty similar to those reported by
other people.  One possibly novel thing: I noticed, without paying close
attention, that some of the recent updates to Fedora 20 have been
CUPS-related.  That motivated me to roll the dice and try duplex printing
again.  And shazam!  It worked!

If that were the end of the story, I wouldn't bother to tell it.  The printer
once again does *not* print duplex.  I'm assuming that the problem must have
been fixed by one CUPS-related upgrade and broken again by a later one.  Here
are the candidates:

# rpm -qa --last | grep -i cups
cups-filters-1.0.53-2.fc20.x86_64             Thu 15 May 2014 11:48:18 AM PDT
cups-filters-libs-1.0.53-2.fc20.x86_64        Thu 15 May 2014 11:48:15 AM PDT
bluez-cups-5.18-1.fc20.x86_64                 Fri 02 May 2014 12:18:41 PM PDT
cups-1.7.2-1.fc20.x86_64                      Wed 30 Apr 2014 11:41:06 AM PDT
cups-libs-1.7.2-1.fc20.x86_64                 Wed 30 Apr 2014 11:40:45 AM PDT
cups-filesystem-1.7.2-1.fc20.noarch           Wed 30 Apr 2014 11:40:45 AM PDT
python-cups-1.9.65-1.fc20.x86_64              Sat 15 Mar 2014 03:09:34 PM PDT
gutenprint-cups-5.2.9-14.fc20.x86_64          Mon 23 Dec 2013 11:23:50 PM PST
cups-pk-helper-0.2.5-2.fc20.x86_64            Mon 23 Dec 2013 11:08:33 PM PST

Unfortunately, as I said, I wasn't paying close attention to the timing of the
not-work/work/not-work cycle, so I can't shed any more light on the problem.
If you can, I'd love to hear from you.

BTW, the driver I'm using is:

    Brother HL-5250DN Foomatic/Postscript

and it *does* have the duplex printing option enabled:

    Double-sided printing: Long Edge (standard)

Thanks.

-- Mike