Answers

Q Use the source

As with all previous versions of Ubuntu since Ubuntu 16, I haven’t been able to get my printer to work. It works fine on Ubuntu 16 and Mint 17, but not with later versions for various reasons. My latest attempt on Ubuntu 20.04 failed early on due to not being able to install the driver supplied in a tar file. The usual paths of ./configure or ./install.sh don’t appear to be available on Ubuntu 20.04. With time running out for support for Ubuntu 16 I need your help on this Ubuntu 20 problem. How can someone without a degree in Linux brain surgery (me) make ./configure and ./install.sh available on Ubuntu 20.04?

John Bourne

The path ./ refers to the current directory, so ./configure runs the configure script that’s in the current directory, the one supplied with the tarball. Each configure script is specific to the software it comes with. It’s not supplied by the distro, although it does call on commands from the compiler toolchain, so that needs to be installed. You don’t mention which printer you’re using, but most of them come with pre-built drivers, certainly for the likes of Ubuntu. The ./configure script is normally only used when compiling software from source. It generally configures the