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Some time ago I bought a Brother MFC-5490CN printer knowing that Brother provides Linux drivers for this device. Since I’m using mostly FreeBSD systems I spent some time to get that printer running on my systems. Finally I did it. Here’s how I did this:

First you need to ensure that you have print/a2ps-a4, print/a2ps-letter installed.

Then download the filter drivers for Linux from Brother. I used the .deb-Archives and extracted them to a temporary directory.
The Linux driver is installed under /usr/local, but I don’t liked that so I created a separate directory in the opt-tree.

mkdir -p /opt/brother/mfc5490cn

And copied the two important directories from the Linux drivers over to that directory. These are the lpd and inf directories in the data part of the .deb-Archive.

cp -R /tmp/brmfc5490cn/data/lpd /opt/brother/mfc5490cn/
cp -R /tmp/brmfc5490cn/data/inf /opt/brother/mfc5490cn/

Since I changed the paths to these files I had to change these within the filter driver. Edit /opt/brother/mfc5490cn/lpd/filtermfc5490cn and change the BR_PRT_PATH variable to:

BR_PRT_PATH=/opt/brother/${PRINTER}

Then you need to edit the /opt/brother/mfc5490cn/lpd/psconvertij2 file, since there is a ambiguous sed command. You need to find the line saying:

RESOLUTION=`sed -n '/\<Resolution/p' $RC_FILE`

And change it to:

RESOLUTION=`sed -n '/^Resolution/p' $RC_FILE`

In my case I also had to change the /opt/brother/mfc5490cn/inf/brmfc5490cnrc file to make the printer use A4 instead of Letter format. Change the line:

PaperType=Letter

To:

PaperType=A4

Finally You just need to setup your /etc/printcap. Just paste the following lines and change the hostname in the rm line:

mfc5490cn:\
        :mx=0:\
        :sd=/var/spool/lpd/mfc5490cn:\
        :sh:\
	:rm=gutenberg:\
	:rp=lp:\
        :if=/opt/brother/mfc5490cn/lpd/filtermfc5490cn:\
#	:lf=/var/log/spool.log:

If you run into trouble just set the lf line active and run the following commands:

touch /var/log/spool.log
chown daemon:wheel /var/log/spool.log

If you need more output from the filter just write a set -x line in the /opt/brother/mfc5490cn/lpd/filtermfc5490cn and /opt/brother/mfc5490cn/lpd/psconvertij2 files. The output will be logged to the spool.log.

Yesterday we tried to install OpenSolaris 2009.06 on a x86-based server at work. The first attempts ended in a sudden reboot without any error messages. But then the installation worked but the system kept rebooting the installed system. We didn’t expected any hardware errors since the server is brand-new. Nevertheless we ran some tests but memtest showed the same habit to reboot the whole system. After some observation we found out that the reboots occured exactly after 4 minutes of testing.
We’ve searched the internet for solutions but the problem was unknown. So we searched through the handbook of the Super Micro X7SBE motherboard and my instructor found something that was worth a try. There was a jumper mentioned which controls the behavior of the built-in watchdog timer. The jumper was set to reboot the whole system if an application hangs. So we set it to just send an interrupt to the application and… behold… memtest just stopped after 4 minutes with a message about an unexpected interrupt. The third setting was for disabling the watchdog timer completely. This is the setting we chose finally and now the system runs fine.