I started with Knoppix about 4 months ago and have updated it regularly. I use KDE.

I just bought a printer, a Brother HL-1440 and when I used the KDE Add Printer Wizard, it didn't know about the Brother printer. When I booted from the Knoppix CD and tried the Add Printer Wizard, it of course knew about a zillion more printers than my 'updated' Debian system, including the Brother HL-1440.

In fact, the 'updated' version didn't even know about my old printer, a Samsung ML-1210. When I moved my Knoppix system to the hard disk, I immediately added the Samsung. After innumrable updates and dist-updates, much printer information has been lost from my system. How come? What do I have to install to restore a reasonably complete add printer facility.

I managed to goof around with information on from linuxprinting.org and got both of my printers running on the system, one on the parallel port and the other as a USB printer. So I am in business. I am just wondering about resrtoring printer data bases and printer configuration. 'gv -h' indicated appropiate drivers were present. I don't have the foomatic-db installed; should I have it?