Installing Drivers

[tedanderson]

The more I use Linux, the better I get at it, however, I am still having a few minor "road-blocks" as it relates to installing drivers. I've been to manufacturer's websites that contain their own online repositories but I have not been able to successfully install a downloaded driver.

I went to Primera's website and I downloaded a beta version of the driver for the Bravo II printer. Even though they provide the driver, they do not support it so I was not able to get any help from them.

I've downloaded the zipped file, decompressed it and I have the "tarball" file with the .gz extension but I have not a clue as to what to do next. Do I need to copy this folder into a particualr directory and/or is there a command that I need to type in from the terminal?

[TMcKellar]

With tarballs you need to unzip them. More than likely you will need to install it from the command line as follows.

gunzip driver.tar.gz
cd /path/to/driver/folder
./configure
make
sudo make install

If ./configure or make give you errors you'll know. These will be the most likely place something will happen. Usually it is just something you don't have installed.

[tedanderson]

Ok, thanks! My other question is about the path. When I want to gunzip the tarball, what directory do I need to put it in? Or does linux "automatically" find it?

[TMcKellar]

It will more than likely just unzip it in the directory the tarball is in. So if it is on your Desktop, then the unzipped folder will end up on your desktop. Alternatively you should be able to double click on the tarball and extract it using Archive Manager. That is depending on your distribution and desktop environment.