After a regrettable moment of madness, which involved installing xubuntu on my laptop, I had to reinstall Linux Mint Debian Edition. To my horror, my Brother laser printer would no longer print. According to the GUI configuration program, my printer was recognised, but any job sent to the printer, though listed as completed, never actually printed onto paper.
Searching the forums led nowhere. Many people had experienced the problem, but no one was offering a solution, except to say that the problem was an "upstream" bug (i.e. from the testing branch of Debian). Having used Debian testing for a long period of time, I didn't accept that explanation. I reasoned that the bug had probably been fixed in the testing branch since the LMDE update pack was released. So I made some additions to /etc/apt/sources.list...
#default LMDE repos
deb http://linux-mint.froonix.org/ debian main upstream import
deb http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/debian.linuxmint.com/debian/latest testing main contrib non-free
deb http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/debian.linuxmint.com/debian/latest/security testing/updates main contrib non-free
deb http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/debian.linuxmint.com/debian/latest/multimedia testing main non-free
#Debian repos
deb http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free
deb http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian stable-updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian stable-updates main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main contrib non-free
Why did I point my sources.list towards debian stable? Unbelievable as it may sound, some core packages of debian stable are more recent than in LMDE, and possibly newer than debian testing packages. After making the changes, I did sudo apt-get update, sudo apt-get upgrade and sudo apt-get dist-upgrade. After all the upgrades to the base packages from the stable branch, it was time to edit my sources.list to point to debian testing...
#Debian repos
deb http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian testing main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian testing main contrib non-free
deb http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian testing-updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian testing-updates main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/ testing/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ testing/updates main contrib non-free
After that, the same old apt-get routine. If you don't want the LMDE repositories to clash with debian testing repos, comment out the debian lines with a hash at the start of each line, or delete them altogether. I'm pretty sure that the next update pack won't be arriving for quite a while, so obtaining upgrades from debian is pretty safe right now. More importantly, my printer now works as it should.
No comments:
Post a Comment