HOWTO Install Samsung Unified Printer Driver

[peterthevicar]

Fabulous, thank you. I was tearing my hair out trying to get a CLP-620ND to work with CUPS in Ubuntu Natty 11.04. The Generic PCL 5c/hpjs driver worked pretty well but VERY slowly. I tried a manual install of the ppd from the Unified Driver package but that printed full width in draft, half width in normal and quarter width in best quality mode. Adding this repository and installing the samsungmfp-driver and samsungmfp-data packages gave me access to the Samsung drivers, I added the printer again and all was well.

The only issue I had was with page alignment: the printing was too high and too far to the right. I edited the /etc/cups/ppd/CLP-650ND.ppd adjusted the last two numbers in the ImagingArea for A4 and corrected it that way - not a pretty solution but it worked!

Hope this may help anyone struggling with the CLP-620ND.

One remaining issue is that sometimes left aligned plain text in my document gets right aligned in the printout - weird! Work around is to use a font not built into the printer.

[luismanolo]

Many thanks from Spain, my printer works fine.
Good work.
Thanks again.

[tweedledee]

In a fresh system install of ubuntu 11.04, I install the unified driver from the repository, as described in the first message. However, my samsung clp-315 printer keeps using ubuntu's driver (spl-c) instead of the new one, resulting in wrong colors (I remember having exactly the same problem on a previous ubuntu installation, before using the unified driver).

How can I force it to use the unified driver?

If you manually configure the printer (using either Ubuntu's tools or the Samsung Configurator) and select the Samsung driver, it should not revert back to the default. It will probably never pick up the Samsung driver otherwise, though.

[flinkdeldinky]

I'm on an AMD64 Debian testing system. Using your deb packages I finally got my CLP-325 printing in color as well as the Windows drivers (it least in my limited testing).

Without your packages CUPS was able to detect and install a driver that gave me full printing functionality except that printing a photo was to dark (I'd describe it as muddy) and had a weird not quite horizontal banding.

I tried to install the Samsung Driver by hand but the configurator was uncooparitive. Although if I ran it from the shell command (I think it was install.sh) it would install automatically the correct driver. Except it would be attached to mfp4 and that didn't work. And there was a deamon smfpd that would eat up 25% cpu nor more or less. I found no way to change connection and the configurator wouldn't list anything I recognized as a USB connection.

I was able to reconfigure the connection using CUPS web interface but whenever I tried to print the printer would actually print a page complaining I was using the wrong driver.

So I uninstalled it and I installed your debs. Basically a variation of the above. The mfp connection thing is a real problem on my system. Then I saw on your site that I only needed the driver and data debs. So I uninstalled everything and reinstalled just the driver and data debs.

Cups saw the clp-325 (as usual) and when I setup the printer I chose to use the Samsung CLP-320 Series (SPL-C) driver and not the foomatic driver. Then when I configured the driver I got different options so I knew the foomatic driver wasn't being used. I set the color to vivid and presto!, picture perfect photo prints.

So I recommend debian testing users (and everybody else!) just use the driver and data debs. Then go into cups and a handful of clicks later you're good to go. Samsungs configurator doesn't offer much and cups does everything fine (I assume kde/gnome interfaces work fine as well).

Thank you!

[CalvinK]

Scanner WORKS for me on Ubuntu 11.10!

I have a Xerox WorkCentre PE220, which functions just like a -Samsung SCX-4521F. I've debugged for a few hours and the scanner function finally works!

1) Install samsungmfp-scanner.
2) Now try this! => sudo modprobe usblp
3) You can use 'xsane' or 'Simple Scan' to test... does it work now?
4) If it works, then it means that 'usblp', which has been blacklisted, is the key. To un-blacklist it,
a) modify /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-cups-usblp.conf
b) Comment the line by prefixing with a '#':
#blacklist usblp
After this step, you don't need to 'sudo modprobe usblp' after starting your machine.

Well, it works for me, but I'm not sure if it can help to solve scanner problems faced by you all. Share you experience here!

Thank you very much. I works just fine for me too with a Samsung CLX 3185. I had that problem since the last update some weeks ago

[Joseph Nickerson]

I have a Samsung SCX-4828FN printer/scanner and I'm trying to set it up on a work network so that we can print wireless from a number of different printers. I currently have a number of desktop printers set-up and a version of "Samsung Universal Print Driver" installed, however I am only able to print from one machine that is connected via USB connection. Is there a step-by-step process that you might know of that would solve my problem of getting a wireless print option set-up for the various PC's in my work network?

We are all currently using windows vista home edition. Any ideas that would help?

Thanks,

Joe

[tweedledee]

We are all currently using windows vista home edition. Any ideas that would help?

If this is a printer connected to a Windows machine and you want other Windows machines to see it, this is probably not the right forum. Any general guide on sharing printers in Windows will probably give you the information you need, it should not be Samsung specific. I have no idea how printer sharing works in Vista. At one point, Samsung had a "SyncThru" utility available for certain printers that helped with certain kinds of sharing under Windows (~2004 was the last time I dealt with this problem under Windows), I'm not sure if that is relevant or even still available.

[MFonville]

I do use the most recent version of this driver from the repository for my Samsung CLX-3185FN via the network. I recently upgraded one of my workstations to the beta of Ubuntu Precise. This did break the printerdriver, also after re-installing the driver and deleting+re-adding the printer in CUPS.

The printer GUI keeps reporting that the Toner/Ink is not in place and therefore printing jobs don't get executed. Meanwhile printing from the other workstations with Oneiric don't give any trouble.

Any chance to research the cause of this issue and prevent trouble when people will start upgrading to the final release Precise at the end of this month?

[tweedledee]

Any chance to research the cause of this issue and prevent trouble when people will start upgrading to the final release Precise at the end of this month?

If you're willing, please try the 3.00.65 version driver available in the repository and see if that causes the same issues. In addition, please share what protocol you are using (LPD, IPP, ?) over the network. You also might want to check and see if there is a way to disable those checks in the printer configuration (with the most recent driver).

The version of CUPS in Precise is newer, and there is a comment in the changelog that may be relevant: "Fixed supply level reporting for some printers." However, it's not linked to any references, so I'm not sure what the technical change was nor if it is relevant. The only obvious way to test would be to install Precise and then force-downgrade the CUPS packages to the prior versions, or to see if any Debian testing/unstable users are seeing anything similar over the last few weeks.

It may also be something else entirely, but these are my initial guesses as to where to start.

[MFonville]

If you're willing, please try the 3.00.65 version driver available in the repository and see if that causes the same issues. In addition, please share what protocol you are using (LPD, IPP, ?) over the network. You also might want to check and see if there is a way to disable those checks in the printer configuration (with the most recent driver).

I did now try it with the 3.00.65 driver, exactly the same issues. I do use IPP over the network.
I will look into the possibility of disabling the toner level reporting, but that would (of course) be a regression (also for the other non-Precise workstations)

The version of CUPS in Precise is newer, and there is a comment in the changelog that may be relevant: "Fixed supply level reporting for some printers." However, it's not linked to any references, so I'm not sure what the technical change was nor if it is relevant. The only obvious way to test would be to install Precise and then force-downgrade the CUPS packages to the prior versions, or to see if any Debian testing/unstable users are seeing anything similar over the last few weeks.

It may also be something else entirely, but these are my initial guesses as to where to start.

Maybe it is possible to contact the person that did create the patch for the ink level reporting? The developer involved for sure would know whether it might be the cause of this issue. Meanwhile, force-downgrading is tricky for me, since multi-arch disabled the possibility of using aptitude to select my packages easily and I don't have the time at this very moment (maybe somewhere later coming weeks) to play around with different versions of the packages manually.