The problem is entirely in the installer, not the driver.

After I bought an SCX-4100 a couple of years ago, I ran the installer. I saw right away that most of what the installer did was worthless. It installed some GUI that was simply inferior to CUPS+KDE. That made me mad, so I undid the effects of the installer and dissected it until I figured out what actually needed to be installed to just print and scan. The list of files required turns out to be pretty simple, as long as you connect via USB instead of the parallel port:

- /usr/lib/cups/backend/mfp

- /usr/lib/cups/filter/rastertosamsung{pcl,spl,splc}

- /usr/lib/libmfp.so*

- /usr/share/ppd/Samsung/scx4100.ppd.gz

- /usr/lib/sane/libsane-smfp.so*

- /etc/sane.d/smfp.conf

You can get all of these files out of the driver package. None of them need to be installed suid root or anything out of the ordinary. All you need is read/write access to /dev/usb/lp0 (provided by the usblp kernel module), which you can usually gain by being a member of group "lp" or whatever your distribution calls it. Also, you need a line in /etc/sane.d/dll.conf that contains "smfp" so that sane will look for libsane-smfp.so .

Use the normal CUPS and SANE configuration steps to set it up. If you're lucky, you can use http://localhost:631/ , unless your distribution has disabled that method of configuration.

I blogged about this two years ago:

    http://hathawaymix.org/Weblog/2005-07-15

Note that many of the details have changed. This post is more correct.

Even though I've avoided the setuid security hole by installing by hand, I'm still very irritated that I have to use proprietary binaries with who knows how many security holes. Next time I'm not going to settle for a proprietary driver. Samsung advertised Linux support and that's half the reason I bought the printer, but I didn't realize the driver was proprietary until I already had the printer.

Samsung, if you read this, listen up: I am happy with the speed and reliability of this printer (I've gone through 5-6 reams of paper and only 1 cartridge), and I am happy that you have added x86_64 support. However, if I had known that I would spend about 40 hours messing with your drivers just to get the printer to work, I would have bought an HP printer instead, even if it cost twice as much. I will not be a repeat customer and I will not recommend any of your printers to anyone else unless you open your drivers.

Check this out.

I received a new IBM Thinkpad when I started a new job. It was preloaded with Windows XP. I asked permission to put Linux on it; they didn't mind. So I tried to set it up to dual-boot, but apparently Windows has a special partition table that I didn't know about, and I managed to make Windows unbootable. I even destroyed the restore partition by accident.

I tried every tool I could find to get Windows working again because some projects at work are using .Net. No luck. So I ordered Windows recovery CDs from IBM. (The CDs don't come with the laptop.)

Meanwhile, I set up Gentoo with the latest kernel, hundreds of neat applications, OpenOffice, Xinerama, etc... Linux is better than ever on this hardware. Development is going well, though I can't work on the .Net projects yet.

Now I've been waiting for the recovery CDs for a month, all the while enjoying the competition immensely. They say the CDs are on back-order. So I guess a support problem is keeping me off Windows, but I'm right now I'm pretty glad to have this problem!