One of the delicate points of the configuration of the PCLinuxOS in my PII was to make it work nicely with my multifunction printer (FAX, scanner, copier and printer) connected directly to the home network, which I need to use every day for work.
What I wanted was an easy integration, similar to the one I had in MS Office. I need to be able also to easily print to the FAX from Word and Explorer (well, the Open Office and PCLinuxOS equivalents).
My multifunction printer is a Brother MFC-5440CN and I found that brother has drivers for Linux for the CUPS system. I learnt that CUPS is a stardard system for printing in Linux, that was created to solve the problems with printing that Linux seemed to experience years ago, or so I read...
I installed the drivers, what not difficult but required to use the command line. I have no trouble with that, but I recognise that many users will do not know how to do it and might be frightened with a command line. This is something that need to be solved and it is a problem from Brother. The driver was installed using something that is called rpm that seems to be a tool to install applications (I'm learning all this as I go...)
PCLinuxOS has a very nice tool to install applications and even update them automatically from Internet, may be that tool could be used also to intall the Brother drivers, but I don't know if that tool "Synaptic" is compatible with rpm or not (and a standard user doesn't need to know). If they are compatible Brother should issue the instructions explaining how to do it from Synaptic. Ideally there should be a way so with simply clicking in a link in the Brother website, the Synaptic utility automatically starts, downloads and install the printer drivers that I needed. May be it can do it already, but it wasn't there. If it doesn't do it, then that is an idea for the developers... and the driver providers.
In the end I managed to make everything to work printer over the network (that one was easy), scanner and fax, but it took me some time and some googling and figuring for work arounds. That is something that a normal user would not be able to do and is quite a big problem for the popularisation of systems like Linux. I believe that in my case the problems resides more in the drivers provided by Brother because for example it is not possible to print directly to the "fax-printer" BRFAX that the drivers create, instead it is necessary to go through a Brother program called brpcfax and that causes problems to integrate the printing to fax easily. Later, when I describe who to configure my LiveUSB (live system running from a 2Gb flash memory stick) I'll explain in detail how to configure the fax, just in case you arrived here from google trying to learn how to do it :-)
Once the multifunction printer MFC-5440CN was working with all its functions in PCLinuxOS I could start doing my daily work... WITHOUT WINDOWS!!!! and from my old PII 300Mhz 512Mb running in multitasking (couple of word documents, a couple of big spread sheets, a couple of firefox sessions each with 5 or 7 websites (tabs) opened, the calculator... ) and almost at the same speed that I had with XP in my powerful PIV Dual Core 3000MHz and 1Gb AMAZING how inefficient Microsoft is!
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