Samsung SCX-4200 printer

Roland Smith rsmith at xs4all.nl
Tue Jan 6 21:08:52 UTC 2009


On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 12:23:54AM +0100, Luigi Rizzo wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 05, 2009 at 11:26:23PM +0100, Roland Smith wrote:
> > On Mon, Jan 05, 2009 at 05:44:03PM +0100, Erwan David wrote:
> > > On Mon, Jan 05, 2009 at 05:36:35PM CET, Torfinn Ingolfsen <torfinn.ingolfsen at broadpark.no> said:
> > > > On Sun, 04 Jan 2009 23:14:22 +0100
> > > > Harald Weis <hawei at free.fr> wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > > Is there a way to install the SCX-4200 printer on a FreeBSD box ?
> > > > > The printer is delivered with the install software required for Linux.
> > > > > And CUPS does not seem to "know" it.
> ...
> > > It is not always sufficient. My Brother DCP-540 CN is said to work
> > > perfectly, but only with brother binary linux drivers, under linux. I
> > > did not find any way to make it work under freeBSD.
> > 
> > This should be a FAQ: do yourself a favor and get a printer that
> > supports postscript. It will work with little effort with most
> > UNIX-based program (because they usually support postscript output) and
> > with most spoolers.
> 
> Actually, this is debatable. If everybody were following your
> suggestion we wouldn't have support for a lot of devices (printers,
> disk controllers, scanners, wireless and network devices, embedded
> systems) that now do work with FreeBSD or other Open Source systems.

There is actually one crucial difference between printers and the other
classes of hardware you mention. Printers are usually driven by a kind
of page/job description language (postscript, pcl, esc2p etc) whereas
the others are not. So a printing system that generates e.g. postscript
can work with scores of printers.

IMHO it is actually a waste of resources to reverse engineer or write
drivers for printer manufacturers that need to reinvent the wheel with
every model.
 
> We are talking about a 70euro laser printer here

While I agree that is not a lot of money, it is still a pretty expensive
doorstop. 

> it is not unreasonable to take a bit of a risk and try it out, and it
> is also good for the community to have people willing to test new
> hardware and report success or failure.

That is true enough. But the OP didn't sound like someone who bought a
printer to test it. I would not expect those people to need to ask for
assistence on freebsd-questions.

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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