Having successfully managed to get the printer side up and running I thought installing the scanner drivers would be straight forward. Wrong!

Is there anyone patient enough to help a total dork through the process?

From the Brother solutions website I follow their instructions but am obviously going wrong somewhere. Simple things are not clear to me, such as the pre-required program "sane-utils" must be installed. How do I find that out? I think it is because I put sudo nano sane-utils in a Terminal and it just highlighted a line with those words in it, below that line was a flashing prompt, not a command prompt, but no details.

I downloaded the correct drivers, brscan3 and brscan-skey,into the download folder. Turned on printer/scanner and connected the USB cable. You then have to open the Terminal and go to the directory where the drivers are. To do what??? Are you supposed to drag them out and paste them somewhere? I just opened them with GDebi and then put the "force all" code in the Terminal using sudo.....command not found, without sudo....command not found.

Check to see if they had installed....nothing.

Can anyone help please?

You can open up the software center (whatever Ubuntu is calling it these days) and see there whether sane-utils in installed or, from command line, run the command "locate sane-utils"--if it's installed, locate should return results similar to this (this in on Debian):

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Frankbell,

Many thanks for that. Yes, the command line confirms that sane-utils is installed, so that is not a barrier preventing the drivers being installed, but something is.

Are you able to give me even more help? This instruction on the Brother website saying open a Terminal (easy) and go to the directory that has the drivers in it. Sounds simple enough but what do I do with the directory once I open it? I actually copy and paste the installation command from Brother straight into the Terminal so that I know the characters and spacing are correct. With sudo or without sudo nothing works, the output is "command not found". I tried all sorts of different commands and one gave the output "error, requires read/write access to dpkg status area".

Brother instruction 4.4 gives a code to check the installation......nothing no output, the flashing prompt just comes up awaiting the next command.

I haven't got round to the last bit which is about normal users for USB connection, that looks really complicated. Oh joy!

I've never dealt with this make of printer, but I will be happy to help as much as I can.

I have two suggestions off the top of head: Look for a file named "readme" or "installation" or something like that in the material you downloaded from Brother. If you try to install it manually, you should use "sudo."

If the file is a *.deb file, you should be able to open the file manager, point your mouse at the file, right-click, and select something like "Install with Software Center" or "Install with gdebi." Either one should ask you for your password, because installations should normally be done with root privileges.

Here's a thread from the Ubuntu forums on installing Brother drivers. Maybe it will help: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=590793

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Hi Frankbell,

Again, many thanks for replying. Sorry about the delay in getting back to you but I was up until 02.45 trying to get it working. We are so nearly there, I can't understand where I have gone wrong. I can carry out the Ubuntu system app. Simple Scan and it works but it will not scan from my printer/scanner??? Any ideas on this please?

The link you gave me was helpful but a little outdated, the commands it used would not work in Ubuntu 11.4, but gave me the big clue I needed with reference to "open a Terminal and go to the directory which holds the downloaded drivers". I had to change the command line using code "cd Downloads" then I was into the open folder. I actually learned something there. No wonder nothing happened in the "root" terminal. (If that is what it's called)

Another problem arose after altering libsane file. When I tried to quit the file I received the warning " Process still running, closing Terminal will kill it." It sure did...every time I lost my changes no matter what I did. In the end I googled the problem, did a lot of reading before someone explained that Ctrl+X would exit. I didn't know the ^ symbol meant Ctrl key!!! Things were still not clear-cut because a box then demanded that you write file name, which was already written in there, as it was so late by now I just hit the enter key (giving up) and that seems to have half worked, at least I can simple scan now.

A bit more info:- the multi-media socket on the printer/scanner works just fine with my SD card and Shotwell. A big surprise, I expected more problems there. I am spelling all this out in case someone else with the same problem is following this thread.

I'm glad you got it working. And it sounds as if you learned quite a bit along the way. Cool beans.

Seems I spoke too soon, although the images from my camera SD card uploaded into Shotwell OK, when I tried to print them off the printer wouldn't co-operate, it insisted the paper size was wrong every time even though it was correctly set on the printer.

I could live with the printer scanner not working by using Simple Scan, but the photographic side is a bit of a pain.

Anyone out there had the same problems and managed to sort them? What are your thoughts on trying an upgrade to Ubuntu 12.4 in the hope that the new system recognises the printer/scanner, or should I just uninstall the lot and try again?

The moral here is that the DCP J125 is not easily compatible with Ubuntu 11.4 so be warned.