I googled around and found the advice on installing the Brother MFC-215C printer confusing and not working for me. I've just made printing work (yet to try to sort the scanner) by a fairly straightforward method for Mint 8 and 9RC which 'should' work for Ubuntu 9.40 and 10.04. (there may be differences in what you call your menu system) This may help anyone googling in future as I hope the steps are clear enough:

Download the two packages for the MFC-210C from http://welcome.solutions.brother.com...nload_prn.html
You want both the following here on that page:

LPR driver deb 1.0.2-1 740 KB 2006.Mar.31
cupswrapper driver deb 1.0.2-3 12 KB 2007.Jul.11

The files are called:

mfc210clpr-1.0.2-1.i386.deb
cupswrapperMFC210C-1.0.2-3.i386.deb

--->open package Manager and install "csh"
---> plug in printer and install mfc210clpr-1.0.2-1.i386deb file
--->open terminal, enter "sudo nautilus" browse to "usr/share/cups" directory in the file system, create a "model" directory, keep nautilus open to watch.
---> Install the cupswrapperMFC210C-1.0.2-3.i386.deb file. Watch in nautilus as a file is created in there, brmfc210c_cups.ppd. this is important!
--->Click Menu/Control Centre/Printing and up comes the printer popup.
--->Clicked add new printer.
--->Click on Brother MFC-215C, click forward and it tries to find drivers. It fails and offers to add a .ppd file, choose this option and then click to browse for the .ppd file that was made in "usr/share/cups/model directory and it will install your printer driver!!!!
--->You can now print a test page, which should work, then go on to print your documents.