I bought the Samsung CLP-300 color laser printer few months back. It’s quite compact and energy star compliant. It’s a decent printer for home use. You can’t print photos in photo paper, but it’s pretty good for regular documents. The good thing about this printer is that it’s compatible with Linux. Ubuntu comes with the printer driver, but forums advised against using that. They instead suggested using the open source driver. Here are the steps to install the driver. Warning: The steps involves using a terminal.

a. If you are using Ubuntu 8.10, then enable /proc/bus/usb support as given here.

b. If you are using Ubuntu 8.04, then type the following command in a terminal and press enter

sudo gedit /etc/init.d/mountdevsubfs.sh

Remove the comments under the section

#
# Magic to KEEP /proc/bus/usb working
#
#mkdir -p /dev/bus/usb/.usbfs
#domount usbfs “” /dev/bus/usb/.usbfs usbfs -obusmode=0700,devmode=0600,listmode=0644
#ln -s .usbfs/devices /dev/bus/usb/devices
#mount –rbind /dev/bus/usb /proc/bus/usb

It should look like

#
# Magic to KEEP /proc/bus/usb working
#
mkdir -p /dev/bus/usb/.usbfs
domount usbfs “” /dev/bus/usb/.usbfs usbfs -obusmode=0700,devmode=0600,listmode=0644
ln -s .usbfs/devices /dev/bus/usb/devices
mount –rbind /dev/bus/usb /proc/bus/usb

Save the file.

You can reboot or type the following command:

sudo /etc/init.d/mountdevsubfs.sh start

Once you are done with step a or b, open a terminal again.

Type the following commands one by one and press enter

  1. wget -O foo2zjs.tar.gz http://foo2zjs.rkkda.com/foo2zjs.tar.gz
  2. tar zxf foo2zjs.tar.gz
  3. cd foo2zjs
  4. make
  5. ./getweb 300
  6. sudo make install
  7. sudo cp samclp300-0.icm /usr/share/foo2qpdl/icm/
  8. sudo cp samclp300-0.icm /usr/share/foo2zjs/icm/

Reboot  your computer and your printer should be ready. You can check it by going to System – Administration – Printers.

Thanks to foo2qpdl for the help.

Samsung CLP-300

Samsung CLP-300