I think I've figured out why I can get my old Brother HL-1435 working in 64-bit Wheezy, I have i386 multi-arch support enabled, just a stab in the dark but that printer was built back in the 32-bit days, hence the need for the 32-bit CUPS wrapper from Brother.
So with any luck, PCLinuxOS 32-bit MATE with the PAE kernel (PAE kernel requires a manual install after PCLOS is on the HDD) is my answer, polished, lots of apps and no virusd, and maybe even a working printer OOTB, possibly no proprietary driver needed.
On another bizarre note, 64-bit Wheezy struggles with AMD's IOMMU and the Via chip USB 3.0 controller (see
this post for the fix), I live booted the PCLinuxOS 32-bit and everything is fine OOTB (USB mouse working, USB 3.0 working), go figure. Just one less headache to deal with and another bonus. Kind of sucks having to take a step backwards to 32-bit but at least I won't be one of Poett-hat's bitches.
Before anybody asks, I love that printer and building the new computer cleaned out my wallet temporarily, I'm not in a position to run out and buy another printer right now.
Edit: And the 'winner' is...drum roll please...PCLinuxOS MATE amd64. I did a default install on my old machine (actually a re-install, I kind of borked the first attempt doing stupid $#1+), then did a default install of the printing system (CUPS, etc), added my printer, now here's the strange part, all along I've been trying the 'recommended' driver (something-gutenprint-blah-blah), anyway, it turns out the Brother HL-1430 Foomatic/hl1250 works perfectly (hidden half way down the list no less) for my HL-1435. On another note concerning AMD users with a Via USB 3.0 chip like my mobo (see sig), I confirmed in 3
live disks (Salix, Gentoo and PCLinuxOS) that simply adding...
...to the boot line makes everything work the way it's supposed to, no dead USB 2.0 mouse or KB, the USB 3.0 ports work and you can leave IOMMU disabled in the BIOS (default). So when I finally get around to installing PCLinuxOS on my new machine, I just add that to the kernel boot line which is really easy in
PCLinuxOS Control Center->Boot->Set up boot system or during the install.
Note: I have my BIOS in legacy mode, I'm not a big fan of UEFI, so I'm not sure if this works in UEFI mode. At least I found a substitute for Debhat, I can breath easy for a while again. The
only negative was no fakeraid Raid 0 support, no biggy, a single SSD reads/writes at just over 500MB/s anyway, now I have a spare SSD for experimenting on my new machine.
Don't get me wrong, Salix Xfce is great, it only 'lost' because it wouldn't set up my printer properly. I love Xfce but I'll settle for MATE, I could probably install Xfce in PCLOS but I can't be bothered, besides, MATE has sounds and it's quickly made pretty by installing the elementary-icon-theme package, Clearlooks + BlackMATE window border, oh, and you may want to change the mouse cursor too, the default is 'win8' or some $#1+ like that, if you do, the cursor will be huge, simply close the theme window, go the actual mouse settings, adjust the speed a little, close that, then go back to mouse in themes, the size slider will no longer be greyed out (obviously this a minor bug but my discovered fix works).
I might put Stella (CentOS 6.6 based) on my old machine's 4 HDD fakeraid Raid 0, just so those drives aren't sitting around 'rusting', it's just a workstation backup machine now, any heavy multimedia will be done on my new machine.
Good luck with
your non-virusd distro hopping folks, I found mine.