Brother Scanner Setup in Slackware

Posted by: Andrew Smith
Poster contact info: andrew-smith at mail ru
Author: Brian
Originally published: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/brother-scanner-in-slackware-592889/
Software: Slackware All

I bought a Brother all-in-one (MFC-240C) printer, fax and scanner. The scanner doesn't work out of the box on Linux, but Brother provides drivers for some popular distributions on their website.

Obviously you can't install the RPMs, and compiling brscan2 from source (see the Brother Linux scanner driver page, http://solutions.brother.com/linux/sol/printer/linux/sane_drivers.html ) you get something like this:
sh makepackage 2  d

Version = 0.2.4
Relese Number = 0

makepackage: line 84: epm: command not found
mv: cannot stat `linux-2.6-intel/brscan2-0.2.4-linux-2.6-intel.deb': No such file or directory
make[1]: *** [brscan2] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/andrei/temp/brscan-src-0.2.4/brscan/mk_package'
make: *** [brscan2] Error 2
This is what you need to do to get the scanner working on Slackware:

Get a copy of alien ( http://kitenet.net/~joey/code/alien/ ). Extract it, compile it, and install it. Then run (as root)
alien -c -t brscan2-0.2.4-0.i386.rpm
That will make a .tgz package of the stuff from the RPM. Then install it using installpkg brscan2-0.2.4.tgz

That's it - the scanner will work now.

Thanks to Brian from the linuxpackages.net forums for giving me this solution.

Additional Information for Slackware 12.2

Posted by: Benjamin Runge
Poster contact info: kohlpechrabenweiss at googlemail dot com
Author: Brian /Andrew Smith
Originally published: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/brother-scanner-in-slackware-592889/
Software: Slackware 12.2

This article really helped me a lot, many thanks to Andrew Smith and Brian.

I only want to give some additional information.

I have a Brother all-in-one as well, a DCP-135C and your how-to worked very well on this, too.

I'm using Slackware 12.2 and the standard installation already included perl 5.10 which worked well.

IMPORTANT: Some really nice guy, Bruce S. Babcock, made an alien-extra package that includes all extra files and stuff you need for the Slackware instalation! This information was in the readme.
I created a folder and extracted both the alien installation files and the alien-extra files into it. Then i run the order as given in the install file. And alien worked.
NOTE: There are two packages you have to download from http://solutions.brother.com/linux/en_us/download_scn.html
brscan2 and the scankey
I converted them both, installed them as shown and the scanner worked!

If you don't want to download and install alien, just ask me about the converted rpms.