Younis Hilal (Magui), yhilal@earthlink.net http://transamrit.net/docs/samsung/samsung.txt ----------------------------------------------- This is a summary of how I managed to get a Samsung printer (model ML-2010) installed on Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 (AKA "Sarge"), stable distribution. I've been using Windows for about 15 years or so, and I just set up my first Linux machine, about a month ago on an old computer of mine. So I am a Linux newbie, and if this write-up sounds a bit crude or unsophisticated, that's why:). A little info about my set-up: :~# uname -a Linux Gondor 2.6.8-2-386 #1 Thu May 19 17:40:50 JST 2005 i586 GNU/Linux (Note: "Gondor" is just the name of my Linux machine; I also use a Windows 2000 PC, which I've named "Mordor":) ) I installed this printer using a setup script which was included in a tarball that I downloaded from Samsung's official site (go to http://www.samsung.com/ and click on "Support" or something, search for this printer model, and download the "Linux drivers" that they have available for this printer). The same setup script is also included on the "Drivers" CD that comes with the printer (I discovered this later), though I continued to use the one I had downloaded. >From what I can tell, in other distributions (such as Red Hat), this setup script works with no problems. In Sarge, I had to do a couple of things to get this thing to work. When I first tried running this script in Sarge, I got any number of GTK- related error messages. It appears that the setup script was expecting to find version 1.2 of the GTK package, and I had version 2.0 (a more recent version). After I installed a number of packages, I was able to make all of those errors go away. I believe the package that really did the trick is the one called "libgtk1.2". But, just for completeness, the other packages that I also installed at the same time were "libgtk1.2- dev", "libgtk1.2-common", "libgtkextra-dev", "libgtkextra16". [Note: There isn't a good reason why I installed so many GTK packages. I was pretty frustrated at being unable to fix these GTK errors, and Debian's package-list lists a whole bunch of GTK packages. I thought one or two of them might help, but I had no idea which, so I decided to try installing a few of them, to start with.] Anyway, after the GTK errors disappeared, I thought I would take a look inside /usr/lib and see what new symbolic links had been created, to make these errors go away. I found the following: /usr/lib# ls -lh *1.2.so.0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 28 2005-11-11 22:51 libgdk-1.2.so.0 -> /usr/lib/libgdk-1.2.so.0.9.1 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 30 2005-11-11 22:53 libglib-1.2.so.0 -> /usr/lib/libglib-1.2.so.0.0.10 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 33 2005-11-11 22:54 libgmodule-1.2.so.0 -> /usr/lib/libgmodule-1.2.so.0.0.10 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 33 2005-11-11 22:55 libgthread-1.2.so.0 -> /usr/lib/libgthread-1.2.so.0.0.10 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 28 2005-11-11 22:57 libgtk-1.2.so.0 -> /usr/lib/libgtk-1.2.so.0.9.1 I think that if you find that these links currently exist in your /usr/lib, that will be good enough for the setup script to run. This was the most complicated part, resolving these GTK-related errors. If you are following these instructions, and you have managed to get this far, try running the setup script now, and see what happens. For me, the setup script still wouldn't run at this point. There was one more thing I had to do. The script must be run as root. (At one point, I was trying to run it as a normal user, and when it prompted me for the root password, I gave it, and then nothing would happen.) When I would run it as root, I got this error message: Xlib: connection to ":0.0" refused by server Xlib: No protocol specified ...and one or two other messages. Anyway, it seems the reason for this error is that Debian, by default, does not enable root to run graphical shell scripts (i.e., scripts that run on X windows). To fix this, you can run the following command (I ran it as root): ln -fs /home/Magui/.Xauthority /root/ "Magui" is the login of my normal-user account. You probably already have some other non-root account on your system, which has an .Xauthority. Whatever that account's login is, you should substitute that in for "Magui" in the command above. After doing this, the setup script ran, with no problems. The script installed Samsung's configuration utility, for installing and configurig the printer. This utility is designed to be compatible with CUPS. I was able to use this utility to install the printer, configure it, and that was it. This Samsung utility also allows you to print a test page, and the test page printed perfectly. Then I closed the utility, and opened the web-based CUPS config, just to see if the printer would show up. The printer was indeed there, which was good enough to prove to me that the Samsung config program is able to detect and work with CUPS, if CUPS is already installed on your system. I tried printing the test page from the CUPS config, and that also printed perfectly. I only have one minor complaint about printing from this Linux machine. It just seems to take a while for the printer-light to begin blinking (indicating that it's receiving data). My guess is that there is a lot of pre-processing that has to be done in Linux, before anything is sent to the printer. This is an old computer, running a 233-MHz microprocessor. I'm thinking that maybe this slow processor is the reason for the delay in printing. I use a Windows 2000 computer with a faster processor (1.4 GHz) that prints to the same printer, and the Windows machine sends print jobs a lot faster than the Linux machine. I'll give an example. This report you are reading now was written by me in emacs on the Linux machine. It takes 50 seconds to send this report to the printer (same result if I choose File-->Print in emacs, or if I run the "lpr" command from the command-line). By 50 seconds, I mean it takes 50 seconds from the moment I do the print command, until the moment I see the light blinking on the printer. In Windows 2000, I opened this same file in Wordpad, and it took 2 seconds to send. That's a pretty big difference, and I'm guessing a big reason for it is because the Linux machine is using a much slower CPU. It's not anything to cry about, but it's something easily noticeable. If you're reading this, hoping for clues to make your own Samsung printer work with Sarge (or some other version of Debian), I hope this helps.