brother printer drivers

[peispud]

 If I could get my mfc210c working I would probably keep Vector around on one of my hard drives . http://solutions.brother.com/linux/en_us/index.html . It seems everytime I need to install something it is either in rpm or deb format .

[exeterdad]

I would say that it's very unlikely that us packaging Brother drivers is going to happen.  I'm sure from your Googling pains you've noticed we are not the only Linux distro that doesn't package the drivers.

It's well known in the Linux world that Brother has VERY poor support for Linux.  The available drivers they have are pretty printer specific.  And as you know, you have to install a driver built for the vintage LPR system, and then install a CUPS wrapper for it.  The packages are written so poorly that even a rpm based distro will have to hack their way through installing the rpms.

Converting to a non rpm package would be a nightmare.  Extracting the binaries is easy enough, but the rpm script  is vital to a successful install as it does configuring and launches other binaries in the package to configure even more.  It also assumes that all Linux directory structures and init systems are the same.  I can't remember the name offhand, but the print server it attempts to stop and restart isn't a standard name either.

I have a Brother DCP1000 multifunction laser printer that with much hair pulling I can run with VL.  It's been listed in the "Boat Anchor" section of Linuxprinting for years.  I "might" be able to build a package for it, but wouldn't even attempt to build packages for all the many other drivers that Brother has without being able to verify that the packages could work.  The only thing that keeps my Brother printer out of the landfill is the fact that toner is much cheaper to buy then regular ink.  So I use it for all my black and white printing, or printing that I know may be thrown away after I'm done reading/using it.

Another thought.  Brother printer drivers are not open source.  So us distributing them could be a court battle we aren't financially prepared to take on.

[JohnB316]

In looking further at Brother's site, my gut instinct would be to tell the original poster to get the rpm packages of the LPR driver and the CUPS wrapper for his printer. Once he has the packages, follow these steps for each package (do the LPR driver first):

1) Open a terminal. As a regular user, issue the command

Code:

rpm2tgz name.of.rpm

2) Type su to become root and enter the root account password. Issue the command

Code:

installpkg name.of.tgz

where name.of.rpm or name.of.tgz stands for the name of the Brother rpm.

Before doing anything else, the original poster will also need to download a Slackware package of the C shell, as the Brother cups wrapper is a C-shell script (ACK! but I digress.) Go to http://packages.slackware.it/ and search for tcsh (you'll get matches for tcsh and zsh - either one should work, but I think you'll be safer with tcsh for this task). Be sure to select the Slackware version which corresponds most closely to your version of VL so that you get a working package:

VL 5.0/5.1 - search for Slackware 10.2
VL 5.8 - search for Slackware 11.0
VL 5.9 - search for Slackware 12.0

Download the package, then as root issue the command "installpkg tcsh*" (without quotes) to install the C-shell package.

Once all the packages, including the tcsh package, are installed, then open your web browser and type "localhost:631" without the quotes in the address bar and go there. Add your printer following steps 7 and so forth from the following Brother support page: http://solutions.brother.com/linux/sol/printer/linux/cups_wrapper_install.html

Hope this helps,
John

[peispud]

 Thanks . Yes , from my experiences with other distros tcsh is required . I'll give it a whirl on my next boot - sounds like enough to keep me busy for now .

[peispud]

 CUPS fails to start anyways , back to LinuxMint for now . I'll give the next version a try .