Scanning

About a year ago I moved full time to using a Linux based desktop (Slackware 12.2). For the most part this has been relatively painless and has made my work a lot easier. But every once in awhile I run into some difficulties and today I felt compelled to solve a long standing problem; namely that my scanner didn't work. Well, my printer worked. But my scanner did not. This was irritating since they happen to be one and the same.

After doing some searches for "Brother MFC-7820N" on google and I did, eventually, figure out how to get everything up and running.

First, you should do some reading:

• A Good Thread about getting a Brother printer up and running in Slackware
• A summary of the thread above
• The Alien source code
• The Sane Project home page
• Brother Linux Drivers page

So, the basic process is this. Download the drivers from Brother's website. Unfortunately, if you're a Slack user you cannot use .rpms or .debs, which are the only two formats that Brother distributes their scanner drivers in. This is where Alien comes in. You use Alien to convert the RPM to the Slackware package format.

Note, you need to switch root before converting the RPMs otherwise permissions get messed up.

Also, you may be tempted to use rpm2targz. I know I was. In hindsight I may not have been root when I walked down that route, so it may work. But for me it did not. Regardless, after you've created the slackware packages simply run installpkg (again as root) and lo and behold everything starts working.

Hopefully this helps someone out down the way.