Recommendations on how to best configure Samsung ML-1660 printer

[Member lubod]

As the title says, this is a printer I have:

Samsung ML-1660. Hardware works fine, I can get toner or paper so no reason to not use it.

Software is a bit of a hassle.

Samsung provided (now hosted at HP) a binary only, closed source, 32/64 bit Intel/AMD driver, which installs from a tar.gz file, and poses problems if you want to reinstall/remove, as the package manager has no way to track it. It includes both a custom filter called rastertosamsung, and PPDs for various printers they made.

Apple (who host CUPS and employ the devs) are moving toward deprecating PPDs, in favor of something they call “driverless” printing. No idea if/when this might work in antix or any non-Apple OS.

Also, there is a repository of Debian packages, https://www.bchemnet.com/suldr/ , made from the same Samsung provided drivers online, but the author warns that they are harder and harder to maintain, since they target older software, and over time more and more libraries/dependencies are obsoleted/no longer available. I have used it for now, but if the repo or PPDs vanish, then what?

So long term, is there are way to use the printer with open source?

I found many references to splix, which would theoretically do the job of rastertosamsung, but the packages available depend on LSB, which Debian deprecated sometime around Jessie version 9! Source is this out there. Meanwhile, I do have the PPDs, which would also be required, but that seems like a lot of tinkering for being able to print, for something that should be possible in a automated/prepackaged way.

Any advice? 🙂

• This topic was modified 3 years ago by lubod.

Restore older computers to working order.
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