How to Research Availability of Print Drivers

[Robert Bonomi]

"robert perry" <rperry1742 at verizon.net> wrote;
>
> I intend to purchase a multifunction printer (including fax, scanner, & 
> copier) and return to utilizing the BSD operating systems.  Early research 
> indicates that few printer manufacturers formally support the FreeBSD or 
> Unix operating systems but imply that drivers may still be available 
> elsewhere.  In the past, I remember visiting certain websites that provided 
> links to drivers but have forgotten the address.  Could someone refresh my 
> memory or provide an address that could help?

I take it you don't mean;   <http://www.google.com>

For the 'printer' side, look for something that supports a 'standard'
printer _language_ -- preferably PostScript -- over a serial or parallel 
port, or the 'lpr/lpd' protocol over a network connection.

*OR* look at the (limited!) list of 'winrinters' directly supported by 
Ghostscript.

For faxing, look for something tht is 'Class2.0' (aka EIA/TIA 592) compliant.
any standard fax software -- like 'hylafax' - will talk to it.

For scanning, see the manpage for SANE(7).  also <www.sane-project.org>

The higher-end Brother MFP units pretty much work 'out of the box', for 
everything except scanning. 

Brother provides scanner driver binaries for SANE on Linux, and source-code
for the adventurous.  A quick persual indicates that a number of *nix 
varients are supported, including several *BSD varients (FreeBSD is not 
explicitly mentioned, unfortunately)  It does not look like it would 
require 'linuxemulator' compilation.

A quick attempt at './configure' indicated a need for some tweaking of
pathnames or file location.