installing printer

[merryoakparker]

First, I'm a newbie to LMDE. I'm having a lot of trouble trying to install a Brother MFC-495CW in LMDE. My computer tells me that a generic install is recommended and that doesn't install either. When i go to the printer driver download page, I get my choice of the LPR driver or the cupswrapper driver in the rpm format or deb. Neither works. And there are no instructions specifically for LMDE. All seem to be for openSUSE, Ubuntu, Debian : /etc/printcap
Redhat, fedora, Mandriva : /etc/printcap.local

Assistance, please.
Thanks,
merryoakparker

[uncleguido]

First, I'm a newbie to LMDE. I'm having a lot of trouble trying to install a Brother MFC-495CW in LMDE. My computer tells me that a generic install is recommended and that doesn't install either. When i go to the printer driver download page, I get my choice of the LPR driver or the cupswrapper driver in the rpm format or deb. Neither works. And there are no instructions specifically for LMDE. All seem to be for openSUSE, Ubuntu, Debian : /etc/printcap
Redhat, fedora, Mandriva : /etc/printcap.local

Assistance, please.
Thanks,
merryoakparker

Have you tried this...............http://welcome.solutions.brother.com/bs ... prn1a.html

[zimbo]

Merryoakparker,

I have also recently had issues installing a Brother printer on LMDE but I now have it working. I had to replace a Samsung laser printer which was working fine but then developed a fault so I bought a low cost Brother printer to replace it.

To install the drivers I followed the excellent instructions in this thread:
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=103900

My system is 64-bit but when I tried installing ia32-libs (the first instruction in the above thread) I got a dependency error. This led me to search the forum and I found this thread:
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 0&t=122296
which indicated that ia32-libs was no longer required as it had been superseded by Multiarch. Following the instructions on that post I discovered that my system was running Multiarch so I didn't install ia32-libs.

I followed all the other instructions for installing the printer driver but I couldn't get the printer to work. It was being recognised by my system but whenever I tried printing nothing would print off.

This led me to more searches and it appears that quite a few people have this issue. One suggestion was to add myself to the lpadmin group using the command

sudo usermod -a -G lpadmin YourUserName

but that didn't work for me.

I also came across this blog
http://likeaflowingstream.blogspot.co.u ... nters.html
where the blogger has resolved the issue by updating their system using the Debian stable and testing branches but I didn't want to go down that route in case I broke my system.

Another relatively new post I came across in a LM thread mentioned installing ia32-libs to get their printing working so I decided to install it. For some reason there was no dependency issue this time, and once installed I was able to print off pages.

A long tale but basically if you follow all the instructions in the first thread above it should work for you.