Troubleshooting/Samsung scx-4500W

Mike Cloaked <mike.cloaked at gmail.com> posted the following commentary regarding installation on Fedora 10. Note that some references are to local directories, and you may have to edit these to suit your system.

Setting up the Printer

The following was initially set up for Fedora F10, but after a clean install of F12 it was found that the same technique worked perfectly well for F12.

I downloaded the driver set and untarred them. The drivers are available from Samsung's web page.

However I did not install their script(s). Instead I pulled the following two files out of their Unified Driver file: I added the file rastertosamsungspl (from cdroot/Linux/i386/at_root/usr/lib/cups/filter/rastertosamsungspl) to /usr/lib/cups/filter/
and scx4500w.ppd (from cdroot/Linux/noarch/at_opt/share/ppd/) was needed also. You need to cd to /usr/share/cups/model/foomatic-db-ppds and make directory "samsung", then

gzip -c
/path-to-my-scx4500w/scx4500w.ppd > samsung/scx4500w.ppd.gz

That was all that seemed to be needed. Anyway I plugged in the usb line to the main machine here running Fedora 10, and turned on the printer whilst tailing the messages file.

On startup it immediately recognised the printer and the messages file showed that the device had been found correctly, and culminated in:

Jul 20 20:37:32 home1 kernel: usbcore: registered new interface driver usblp

Jul 20 20:38:00 home1 hal_lpadmin: Added printer SCX-4500W-Series

A window popped up saying the printer had been added and offered me to check the settings - all that I changed was the paper size from the US Letter to our A4 size and then I ran a test page - which looked perfect.

Then I printed a system status page from the printer itself which was fine, and then did a test print from the main machine - all seems well.

CUPS started eating lots of cpu so I restarted it and it settled down nicely. I then checked that the printer was visible to other machines on the LAN and it worked nicely.

I have not used the ethernet cable yet, nor changed the wireless settings. I'll have to put it on the local network and give it a sensible ip address rather than the default 192. address that it comes with.

I have also been preparing the setup to allow scanning but not had a chance to test that yet.

Anyway it is very pleasing that the printer is working, despite being an unsupported printer - and only using the two files pulled from the other Samsung linux application allowed the printer to work nicely.

Scanning

I have also now tested scanning on the scx-4500w. This was initially made to work on a Fedora 10 machine but recently a clean install of F12 turned out to need an extra step. For Fedora F12 it was necessary to add under the Samsung section of the file /lib/udev/rules.d/65-libsane.rules:

# Samsung SCX-4500W
 ATTR{idVendor}=="04e8", ATTR{idProduct}=="342b", ENV{libsane_matched}="yes"

This step was in addition to the changes detailed below. Once the machine was rebooted then scanning worked (eg via GIMP)

No changes were needed in the dll.conf file for Fedora 12.

The remainder of this page applies to what was needed for Fedora 10/Fedora 11.

I installed sane-backends from updates-testing to give "sane-backends-1.0.20-4.fc10.i386"

Then edited /etc/sane.d/xerox_mfp.conf to add two extra lines, according to advice from other postings on the net since the Samsung printer was suggested to work with the xerox_mfp backend setup:

# Samsung SCX-4500W
 usb 0x04e8 0x342b

Then made a new file /etc/hal/fdi/information/19-libsane-scx4500w.fdi with the following content:

<?xml version="1.0"
 encoding="UTF-8"?>                                        
 <deviceinfo version="0.2">
   <device>
     <match key="info.subsystem" string="usb">
       <match key="usb.vendor_id" int="0x04e8">
         <match key="usb.product_id" int="0x342b">
           <append key="info.capabilities"
 type="strlist">scanner</append>
         </match>
       </match>
     </match>
   </device>
 </deviceinfo>

Then I simply fired up the GIMP and asked it to scan - it found the scanner, and it worked without any further setup.

Note that in Fedora 11 the scanner refused to work although printing worked as in Fedora 10. After a lot of fiddling around I found that there is a workaround to what looks like an error in the package "sane-backends-1.0.20-4.fc11.i586", and managed to make the scanner work again -

I found that the dll.conf files in /etc/sane.d/ were interesting.

There were two files in my system - which were:

-rw-r--r--. 1 root root  916 2009-10-03 12:13 dll.conf
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root  664 2009-06-23 09:04 dll.conf.rpmnew

I noted that dll.conf was dated later than dll.conf.rpmnew - and the dll.conf file did not include xerox_mfp, whereas the earlier dated dll.conf.rpmnew did include this and in my case this is needed for the driver!

So To make the .rpmnew version current I simply did the following:

mv dll.conf dll.conf.orig
cp dll.conf.rpmnew dll.conf

I then fired up GIMP and asked for a scan - and it worked just fine. I added a note to a pre-existing bugzilla report and hopefully it will get fixed in due course.

So although I have only tested the printing and scanning capability on Fedora 10 via the usb port it does work very nicely.

Yet to test:

• 1) printer access via ethernet
• 2) printer access via wireless
• 3) scanner access via ether/wifi

If anyone has done any other tests on this Samsung SCX-4500W and has step-by-step setup details I would be interested to hear the information. Either way this is a nice printer, and very quiet in operation, and does look pretty cool too!

Network Access

The printer arrives set up with a default ip address of 192.0.0.192.

In order to get the network interface working in my local LAN which is the in the ip range 10.0.x.x I initially booted up an old laptop and plugged in the crossover ethernet cable that comes with the printer. Then I stopped the NetworkManager service, and then started the "network" service.

Next step is to become root and put the laptop on the same ip range as the printer by typing:

ifconfig eth0 192.0.0.10 up

Then start Firefox and go to the address 192.0.0.192 which immediately connects to the embedded management interface on the printer ( called "SyncThru" in Samsung parlance ) and displayed as a web page in Firefox.

Then it is straightforward to find the network page and change the ip address to either a static ip in the range of my local LAN or let it continue to use DHCP. In my case once I had the MAC address of the printer network interface I could add that to my local dhcp server config and give the printer a local name.

If you are not running your own dhcp server then it is probably easier to give it a static ip on the same range as your local LAN addresses.

The networking is arranged so that if the ethernet cable is plugged in on the printer then it uses the wired interface and if not then it will use the wireless interface.

So next go to the wireless interface page in SyncThru, and set up the required wireless settings for your own local wireless access point. In my case it uses WPA2 with AES encryption but your mileage may vary.

As soon as I disconnected the ethernet cable the printer connected to my wireless access point and received its ip address via my dhcp server. Then firing up Firefox on my main machine and going to the printer ip address connected me to the embedded management interface again (SyncThru). From there the usual range of printer settings was accessible and also monitoring of page usage and toner use.

Next to get printing via the network instead of via USB.

1. In the main machine go to System -> Administration -> Printing -> New Printer
2. Select Network Printer and the drop-down HP JetDirect (even though it isn't).
3. Use the known printer IP in the "host" dialog and leave the default "Port 9100". Click Forward.
4. Select ppd file (as in the sections above) and navigate to it - set the remaining parameters required. Change paper to A4.

Then I sent a test page - and printed a mail item - which seemed fine apart from the page size being a touch too small for the writing at the top and bottom. That can no doubt be tweaked as necessary later. Then any other machine on the network can either use the printer via cups or set it as an independent route via the network as above.

Since the wired cable had been removed this test print went via the wireless network to the scx-4500w. If the printer is wired to your local router via ethernet then the print goes via the wired router - you can't do wireless and wired at the same time.

Scanning via the Network

Scanning via the network was not attempted at the time of writing.