Does my Brother MFC-5100c work under linux?
 

Hi,

I just bought myself a new printer, the Brother MFC-5100c, took it home, set it up, and found that I couldn't find anything on the web about how to get it working under linux. I'm running Debian (don't ask me what version cuz I don't know, but if it's important you'll have to tell me how to find that out). I dual boot with Win2k simply because I'm still too new to Linux to get away with using only that. I know that the printer works though since I can print in windows. I'm connecting through my USB port, though as soon as I figure out how, I want to start using my USB hub. My knowledge of programming is somewhere between weak and non-existant, though I'd say it's closer to non-existant. But feel free to get as technical as you like, it may take me a while, but I'm sure I can figure it out.

I'd appreciate any help I can get, I really really really don't want to have to boot into windows every time I need to print something. I'm not even worried about the scanner/pc fax at this point, I just want it to work.

Cheers,

mike

Welcome to LQ, Mikey.

If you have a program called usbview on your system, run it. It'll tell you all of the details that it can figure out about it. A quick googling came up with these: search results

Hmmm.... so I installed usbview and ran it, this is what it told me:

"Can not open the file /proc/bus/usb/devices

Verify that you have USB compiled into your kernel, have the USB core modules loaded, and have the usbdevfs file system mounted"

When I looked into the file mentioned using nano it was empty.

would I have to add a line into /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab to mount usbdevfs?

I found this entry for /etc/fstab on another site, though I'm not sure it makes sense to me:

none /proc/bus/usb usbdevfs defaults 0 0

Instead of "none" wouldn't I want to give the filesystem a name? all the other entries point to devices (like /dev/hda, etc.)

Also, I've seen references to both usbdevfs and usbfs. What's the difference, if there is one?

cheers,

mike.