Brother Fax 2820 Add to repos or is it safe to download RPM from Brother

[Linath]

Hi all,

Like most people with a non-HP printer I have a printer driver issue.  I know, I know a most boring issue...I will try to keep it short.

Considering the Brother Fax 2820 ( combo fax/Printer/Scanner ) is rather old, I don't see any point to add the driver to the repo's.  While that would be nice, I imagine that there would be a very small number of people who would benefit from that addition so the work/benefit ratio is probably very small indeed. 

Which brings me to another question,  installing the drivers from the RPM on Brother's site.   This looks to be remarkably straightforward however it goes against my grain of ( Only install software from the repos! )

Basically is it safe to do so when the software ( Printer driver ) has not been properly "Vetted"?   I also wonder about how easy it is to "poison" an RPM that is outside the repos!  ( Yeah, I realize that sounds kinda paranoid, but probably hearkens back to using windows and scanning every piece of software I ever downloaded with antivirus/anti malware software).

Thank you and I apologize if this is in the wrong place.

[bicol_willem]

Hi, I see not many replies to your question.
I understand your "fear" but I had similar problems in the past with certain Canon printers (covered now).
I did what you fear so much and installed the available drivers from Canon. I know, that is not Brother but .....
I did the same with a Xerox laser printer and if it gives you courage: I never had any problem installing such drivers. Of course, the real call remains to you! 

[Linath]

Thank you bicol_willem,

I would imagine that there is nothing to really worry about, if there was an issue it probably would have been covered by now.

Thank you for your kind reply it is appreciated, I will do some more googling and then probably install the drivers.

Thanks again,

L

[Ramchu]

There will most likely be no problem with just a driver downloaded from Brother - just be sure to use the RPM version of the driver - if there is one.

I did this same thing for a friend after he purchased a non-supported Epson printer- see my post here:
http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php/topic,103934.0.html

[travisN000]

The biggest concern when installing otherwise reputable RPMs from outside the repo, is that they may over-write files from PCLinuxOS RPM's and cause seemingly unrelated errors.

You can download the RPM and run rpm -ql /path/to/package-name.rpm on the package to get an idea of what it is installing and where, but this will not tell you what other mod's it may be making via root shell commands.

Some of these can be displayed with a --scripts option...  more info here: http://www.rpm.org/max-rpm/ch-rpm-query.html


...as a side note, you can also d/l the .deb file and unpack it for easier inspection; as we are assuming it is from a reputable source, it should be fairly similar in it's contents and scripts..  muungwana has posted info in our forums on how to do this many times.