It works in Crux too! I went exploring and found that Crux has glibc-32 and libstdc++-32 installed already. These are the only libraries that the 32-bit binary Brother drivers use. So I copied the /opt/brother tree over from Debian, made the link to the ppd from /usr/share/cups/model and the one to the main cups filter from /usr/lib/cups/filter and went into cups admin. It found the printer and I was able to print a page out of libreoffice with no problems at all.

A printer that works on 2 out of 3 systems is probably good enough for me. Of course I'd like to get it to work in LFS because that is my main distro these days and the one that I write all my sheet music in. Maybe I could use a trick from the Gentoo wiki. You somehow install rpm utils (build locally?), then download the rpm versions of the 32-bit libraries into /usr/local/lib32. You use the alien program to convert them into tarballs and unpack them. Then you edit the main Brother filter script to put that directory into LD_LIBRARY_PATH so that the binaries can find their libraries.

I'll probably do that, but not now,

You're very welcome!

If, as & when I can justify the extra initial expense, one of those is definitely on my own 'to-get/to-do' list. It's like many things; the running costs over time are minimal, but the initial outlay can be a bit hard to swallow for some folks (myself included).

I have several other items that are pressing for my attention first. That's life, unfortunately.


Mike.