I thought I would write to give some applause to Samsung and their Universal Linux printer driver. Unfortunately my old but faithful HP 4P started having problems with always getting paper jams. Casting about for a possible replacement I spotted a Samsung ML-1665 on special for $49.95. That seemed amazingly cheap for a Laser printer with up to 1200DPI, but at that price I thought it was worth just giving it a try.
Got it in yesterday and I spent some time setting it up this morning. There was the standard CD with drivers for Win/Mac but it would not even read in my openSUSE. So I tried the standard thing of checking through YaST/Hardware/Printers-add to see what I could do. Well it recognized the printer all right but did not have a driver.
Hmm.. off to Samsungs Support to see if I could figure anything out. At he sight is a place to download the Linux driver (25.2MB zip file). So d/l it and extract it. Now what? here is the one area that a novice might find difficult. There is a autorun file that is under the cdroot folder created after extraction. Looking at it in Dolphin I notice it is a script. So I figured I needed to fire up a terminal. I took a guess at what to do next.
Open terminal obtain root rights and cd to files location. Than I ran a
sh autorun -q command. The file executed and the installation program came up with a License agreement and installation dialog. Seconds later after setting options I tested a print page and ..bing -bang-boom.. it printed beautifully. Closed out of the install.
I then tested under office a few different documents and absolutely no problems. I even noticed that the install program had placed icon on my desktop for the printer configuration. Cool!
This little laser printer is light and fast. Good job Samsung!