[vox-tech] Printer installation

[Steve Weiss]

I have a Brother MFC-8860DN printer/fax/scanner network printer 
connected to my 100-TX ethernet network. Right now everything is setup 
for DHCP, hosted by a Netgear FR114P router with firewall and works fine 
w/PCs running Windows XP.

I've been using Ubuntu 7.10 since the last installfest, but I still need 
to get this printer working with it. I tried setting up the printer with 
the driver that Ubuntu automatically recommended, but it doesn't work. 
(More details available, but hopefully not needed if the stuff below 
works out.)

Brother recently began supporting Linux at 
http://solutions.brother.com/linux/en_us/index.html
and came out with drivers including several for my printer. Great! But 
now my Linux novice's ignorance is a problem and the choices begin:

*    Which package should I try first, the one for Debian (.deb) or for 
Red Hat / Mandriva (Mandrake) / SuSE (.rpm)?

*    Brother's CUPS installation instructions at 
http://solutions.brother.com/linux/sol/printer/linux/cups_wrapper_install5.html 
don't use ubuntu's package manager. How do I install this through the 
Synaptic Package Manager? I looked at adding a repository, but I have no 
idea what apt line to enter. And should I point it to the files I 
downloaded or to the URL where I got them? And how would this correlate 
to the installation instructions from Brother, which don't seem to go 
through any such package manager.

*    Brother has both CUPS and LPR drivers. It seems like CUPS does more 
and I should try to install it, but their instructions seem to first 
require LPR driver installation anyway. Plus, having a network printer 
requires LPR as well. Am I understanding this correctly?

*   LPR driver configuration instructions are at 
http://solutions.brother.com/linux/sol/printer/linux/printsetlpr.html. 
Note that my printer is included in the list inside the note box near 
the top on using the file name "brprintconflsr2".

This looks more complicated than it probably is. Does anyone have any 
good advice for me? Or should I just bring all this stuff to the next 
installfest?

Thanks,
Steve