"Boyd Stephen Smith Jr." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> posted [EMAIL PROTECTED], excerpted below, on Sun, 15 Oct 2006 07:55:27 -0500:
> Probably an MFC-7420, like mine, or possibly one of it's "big brothers." > They have cups, lpd, and sane drivers available for x86 linux, but no > support for other arches (including x86_64) last time I checked. They do > have a separate cups driver that allows faxing from your desktop. Just checked 2nite. MFC-8220 IIRC, so it's the "big brother". Are those drivers closed source (in which case no way, I prefer FLOSS drivers, thanks, and certainly won't be putting any of my money into anything without them, "Linux" non-support that closed source ultimately is), or open but simply not ported to amd64/x86_64 yet? Regardless of what others choose, I choose not to run what I see as slaveryware, period, no negotiation even possible. > As I'm on x86_64 and don't need a scanner much, I looked for other cups > drivers that were available from portage and found the Brother MFC-9600 > Foomatic/hl1250' driver worked fine for simple printing. > > FWIW, I think Brother wants to be linux friendly, but haven't (for > whatever reason) but a lot of effort behind it. That could well be. Of course, if they simply open the specs sufficiently, the community will often provide drivers without company effort, and even in the corner cases where they don't, they'll often run with the drivers once supplied, leaving the company free of worrying about continued investment and support. FWIW, I don't play NVidia's or ATI's current "Linux support" games either. If it's not free as in speech, it doesn't get installed. Simple as that. That's why I'm running Radeon 9200 series here, as that was the last of their free products. Anyway, thanks for the info. Very useful! =8^) -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman -- [email protected] mailing list
