Oh I wish printer manufacturers would make opensource drivers, even the ones who provide Linux drivers, still use closed binaries that really don’t work…..

I’ve been trying to get my Samsung ML2510 and Epson RX425 working on my CentOS5 box, and we all know how bad the Samsung drivers are, but I’ve never really had a problem with the Epson ones. Anyway, after applying the Samsung-doesnt-play-nice-with-scanners patch, which was for an earlier version of the unified drivers, I got both printers working and the Epson scanning, however not when they were both powered up.

After hours of screwing around with various .rc files and CUPS settings, I decided to try the SpliX drivers for the Samsung – which required the cups-devel RPM and the CUPS-DDK to be compiled. Well that seems to work a treat (despite it really being a ML2150 driver) so I’m going to remove the patch and I’ve uninstalled the Samsung proprietary software and see if the Epson still works after a reboot (ekpd seems to crash a bit still).

This page might be worth looking at too, as I’m sure on FC3 I had to specify the USB-ID to stop the bloody CUPS popup every time you turn on a printer.

Update: the patch was removed along with the Samsung software, printing and scanning works fine now. I removed hal-cups-utils which stopped the “Add new printer” popup every time I tried to scan, as detailed here.