I have just the most trouble-free installation of a printer ever in linux.

My old Brother HL-1250 gave up the ghost. Likely it just needed a new drum but they are more expensive than a new printer so I bought one of the cheapest Brother lasers I could find on the Viking site, the HL2250DN at £89.99 plus VAT. I knew it did duplex but silly me did not realise until it arrived that it came with a network connection as well as usb.

So I downloaded the driver rpms from the Brother site. Converted them into tgz with the utility alien

Installed them.

To be honest I did check in Windows that the printer was working with Windows and that gave me the chance to sort out its IP address.

Went into cups to modify the printer connection from usb to ipp and the test page printed. Went into OpenOffice and Acrobat and duplex printing works!

Alan

Yeah I like Brother. I've got the HL-2035 b&w laser printer and I had to convert the .rpm's too (with midnight commander I think), but after that, I had to run a script, then set it up in cups, and that was it. Good prints, and cheap to refill.

(Edit: nevermind I can use MC to extract the files and then create a simple .tgz package)

Moved: This thread is more suitable in the Linux General forum and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves.

Actually I am not so happy now. I have now tried it in Slackware 13.37 which uses cups 1.4 . The test page prints but printing from other applications comes out as raw postscript text