<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 TRANSITIONAL//EN">
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; CHARSET=UTF-8">
<META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="GtkHTML/3.28.3">
</HEAD>
<BODY>
I had a weird new experience on Friday with linux.<BR>
<BR>
Our Brother MFC-440CN printer/scanner/copier had been refusing to talk to the XP workstation that it's been connected to for about 10 years. No amount of fiddling was cajoling it into communicating. We needed so scan something for our business license. <BR>
<BR>
In desperation, I thought I'd just see if I could do something with our Centos server to diagnose if the problem was the Scanner or the workstation. I could ping the scanner. <BR>
<BR>
To my amazement, I just googled "brother linux scanner" and found Brother's website with Linux drivers, found the driver for the Redhat/Centos/Fedora/64 bit flavor, found coherent instructions, installed the driver, then used the Add/Remove software to install anything that said "scanner", and voila, Xsane came up, found the scanner, and produced a multipage PDF. All within about 20 minutes. And the directions didn't contradict itself, and it ...just worked. <BR>
<BR>
I don't know about anyone else's experience with Linux desktop functionality and vendor specific hardware, but I'm somewhat in shock it was that simple. <BR>
<BR>
Neal
</BODY>
</HTML>