Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Linux and the Samsung ML-2510

This post will probably only affect a small number of people, but it might be useful anyway (if only to remind me next time). Anyway, I found myself setting up a Samsung ML-2510 ( a cheap 25ppm b&w laser printer) on a Gentoo Linux machine yesterday, and was somewhat surprised to find that Samsung supports a good number of their printers and scanners on Linux with a unified driver kit available here (their website doesn't seem to work too well on firefox/flash9 for Linux). The driver comes with a fancy installer (just run the "autorun" binary after you extract it) which works perfectly except that, at least on Gentoo, it puts the cups filters in the wrong directory. So, the trick is to copy/symlink the contents of /usr/lib/cups/filter/ to /usr/libexec/cups/filter/
and adjust the port cups thinks the printer is connected to and things should work well. Good job Samsung for at least trying to provide support, a few of us do appreciate it! (Actually there are open source drivers for printers that speak Samsung's language as well, but I couldn't get them working easily).

If people are interested in a more detailed Linux printing help using CUPS, google around or check out LinuxPrinting.org

EDIT (4-10-07): Fixed model number typo.
RE: Commenter #1: Gentoo's cups start script is /etc/init.d/cupsd. I don't think the installer is necessarily broken, it is just not putting things in the correct places for Gentoo's setup (not sure if it is standardized or not). Another thing to try is to delete the printer the Samsung driver installer made for you (cups web interface) and re-do it using the usb device (/dev/usb/lp0 on my machine) that is associated with your printer instead of the default Samsung path (use the cups web interface: http://localhost:613). The official Samsung driver should be in the list of selectable drivers (I forget what it is under, should be obvious) when you add the new printer through the cups web interface. If you are still having trouble, feel free to email me or try asking on the Gentoo forums.

Sunday, March 11, 2007

Debian Package of the Day

Just a quick post to prove I'm alive ;-)

Apparently some Debian developers have started a "package of the day" project to help introduce people to some of the software available in the Debian repositories. I imagine this could be very useful to people just starting out using Linux (I'm sure there will be more of those, now that Vista is out). They also have a Ubuntu version but I'm not sure how much difference there is between the Debian and Ubuntu repositories anyway, so you might just want to keep track of both. (via ./)

Being a Gentoo user, I find that the Gentoo online package database is also very good for this. Either browse by category or check out what has been updated recently.

There are also some handy list of Windows programs and their open source/Linux equivalents, such as the one offered by the Linux Equivalent Project or this list (which seems a little out of date to me)