This must be my lucky day. I haven’t mentioned it here, but I recently updated to Hardy Heron, without a hitch. All my old problems with Bluetooth, crashes, and so forth, disappeared. It may have been so smooth because I updated the HP Pavillion bios (in Vista), which I think was previously causing untold problems.

Anyway, today, I installed wireless, having done without it for a few weeks, again without problems, and decided it was time to install the printer, and with a bit of luck, the scanner. To recap, I have a Samsung Laser Multifunction SCX-4200, which seems to have caused untold grief on Ubuntu, and not just for me.

I followed the HOWTO Install Samsung Unified Printer Driver instructions at Ubuntu Forums, but while that installed the printer, the scanner was nowhere to be seen.

It really doesn’t have to be this hard, does it?

Which is not a dig at tweedledee, who so generously got so many Samsung printers running, including mine, but I think his tutorial is now outdated with the new Samsung driver - unless of course, the Samsung instructions are a security risk.

Are they?

UPDATE: I forgot I also followed the instructions here, which may have been crucial. Thanks tayroni.

Anyway, I thought I’d uninstall and try again, this time with the instructions from the Samsung site, but having followed the initial tweedledee instructions - sudo chown -R root:root * - all permissions were locked up in root, so I couldn’t uninstall.

I’m not too good at the remembering codes but after much searching I found the code: chmod -R 777 (thanks Nihilocrat at Ubuntu Forums), which get ALL the existing files and subdirectories to 777, that is, back to where you are the owner, not root.

So, if my memory serves, in the Terminal, cd ~/cdroot
yourusername:~$ ~/cdroot$
yourusername:~$ ~/cdroot$ chmod -R 777 Linux

That allowed me to uninstall.

So, back to the Samsung site instructions. (remember, cdroot is the folder the driver extracts to)

[Ubuntu OS Installation]
1. Download and extract the driver
2. Open ”Root Terminal”
3. Execute installation program.
$ sudo cdroot/autorun
4. After intall, PPD path is set again.
$ sudo ln -s /usr/share/cups/model/samsung /usr/share/ppd/custom/samsung
5. Execute Configurator, and Add your printer model name by Add Printer

It was so simple I couldn’t believe it.
Done.

Just go to Applications/Samsung Unified Driver/Samsung Unified Driver Configurator. Click on the Scanner symbol. The SCX-4200 Series on USB 0 icon will appear. Highlight it, then click on Properties, and then you can scan to your heart’s content.

The software isn’t as fancy as in Windows, but it works perfectly, and you can resize the image too.

I really hope there are no security issues in this. Do check the forum on this before risking your setup.

Now for OCR.