Printers

My random choice of printers sort of worked. The laser printed OK, but the colour inkjet stubbornly refused to cooperate. However, a quick trip to the Brother website provided me with the information I needed to make both printers work. Brother provide suitable Linux drivers for most (all?) of their printers. I guess many other manufacturers do the same.

I downloaded the RPM package for the HL2030 laser printer which gives the basic files for using the printer on a Mandriva Linux system. I also got the RPM for the CUPS wrapper which integrates the driver with the printer manager. Installation is easy: run rpm -i package.rpm for the two packages from the from a root user prompt. There was no driver for the DCP-115C but Brother suggest using the MFC-210C driver instead. Happily, this seems to work just fine.

Once the drivers (and wrapper) were installed, I started up the "configure your computer" utility. This is like Windows Control Panel but you need to be the root user (administrator). Going to the printer section of the utility, I removed the printers I had set up when I installed Linux and started an automatic search for printers. All I had to do was remember to choose the MFC-210C when the search failed to find a driver for the DCP-115C.