Our first Samsung printer was a CLP-550N. To install the
driver, I simply grabbed a copy of
CLP-550ps.ppd and put it in
/usr/share/ppd/custom/. That was enough for
CUPS to find the driver when I added a printer via its web
interface. I vaguely recall copying the PPD file off the CD
that came with the printer, but there's a more recent
version in the unified driver tarball on Samsung's web site.
The full Samsung drivers & software packages (see next section for details of how to install these packages) may give you access to additional features such as being able to remotely query the toner cartridge states, but as I no longer have this printer, I can't confirm this.
Having just acquired one of these multi-function printers, I thought I'd download the drivers from Samsung's website and install them. Bad move. Printing worked but nothing I could do would make it recognise that the scanner even existed (and no, it was nothing to do with the firewall, everything to and from the printer was allowed). Then I found The Samsung Unified Linux Driver Repository via a post on the Ubuntu forums and decided to remove the driver and tools I'just installed. That's when I discovered exactly how horrible Samsung's installation software is.
The installer had created Desktop and
.gnome-desktop directories in every
home directory listed in /etc/passwd. Yes, all
of them, including system accounts.
It had also replaced /usr/bin/lpr with its own
version, dumped a few lib files in /usr/lib,
created /etc/modules.conf and more. To make
things worse,the uninstaller refused to run, so I had to
clean everything up manually. It was so bad I ended up
restoring some files from the previous night's backup.
After sorting out the mess and getting my system back to
where it was before I started, I followed the instructions
on the
SULDR page and it pretty much just worked. There was
only one minor problem: installation of one of the packages
(I don't know which one, but it happened on two different
machines) changed the permissions on /dev/shm
from 1777 to 0755, causing Google Chrome to exit instantly
and refuse to restart. Fortunately Chrome prints a nice
helpful error message when you attempt to start it with bad
permissions on /dev/shm, telling you exactly
how to fix it :-)
The packages I installed are samsungmfp-scanner,
samsungmfp-driver, samsungmfp-data and
samsungmfp-configurator-qt4, and they pulled in
samsungmfp-configurator-data and
samsungmfp-netdiscovery. I'm not sure that
samsungmfp-configurator-qt4 was actually
necessary though. After installing them I used the CUPS web
interface to add the new printer, and scanimage
-L found the scanner on the first try.
scanimage -L doesn't find the scanner.