Should we use articles before nouns that are not fully generalized? 

For example: "the birds of America" or "birds of America"? 

We are considering not all birds, but all American birds. So what is the truth? "American birds" or "the American birds"?


Question: How to fix a dpkg broken by the Brother MFC-7340 deb driver
Answer: You can always (re)install a package using dpkg:

dpkg --install local-file.deb


In order to make a "clean room" installation, you can first purge the package and then install it again:

dpkg --purge brmfc7340lpr
dpkg --install brmfc7340lpr*.deb


You might need to add option --force-depends during purge, if some other package depends on brmfc7340lpr.

Update: Based on the transcript you posted, it seems that the
 brmfc7340lpr package cannot be (re)installed because its
 post-removal script is erroring out.

Those files are stored in directory /var/lib/dpkg/info; for each
package X, there can be any one of these scripts:


X.postinst run after the package has been installed, e.g., to
start services provided by the package.
X.prerm run before removing/purging the package, e.g., to
ensure that daemons provided by the package are stopped.
X.postrm run after the package has been removed, e.g., to
signal any service optionally using the package that it is no
longer available.  (For instance, a printer driver package might
want to signal cpus/lpr to remove printers depending on that
specific driver.)


Now, this brmfc7340lpr package seems to try to (re)start the lpd
printer daemon upon removal, which won't work as Ubuntu uses CUPS
instead: you should definitely look for a CUPS-compatible printer
driver -- see the link in Jorge Castro's answer. (I think this is a
bug in the package, as it should not restart the lpd service
unconditionally, but just reload it if it's already running.)

The best option to go forward comes from this launchpad
answer:

ln -s /etc/init.d/cpus /etc/init.d/lpd


This will effectively (re)start CUPS when the lpd service is instead
searched for.

Otherwise, I only see two options, both rather unpleasant:


Either edit the /var/lib/dpkg/info/brmfc7340lpr.postrm script,
and comment out the line that is invoking /etc/init.d/lpd start
(or restart or stop), (e.g., just replace it with /bin/true).
Another option is to just place exit 0 as the first non-comment
line in the script. This would be my favorite, but requires a bit
of confidence with editing shell scripts.
Install lpr, purge the brmfc6340lpr package, purge lpr: this
requires a bit of attention as lpr conflicts with the default
Ubuntu printer spooling system CUPS:

a. sudo aptitude install lpr (this will remove cups-bsd and
  ubuntu-desktop as a side effect)

b. sudo aptitude purge brmfc7340lpr lpr (should work now)

c. sudo aptitude install cups-bsd ubuntu-desktop (restore system
  to its original state)