Samsung Printer Drivers
Ernest Babin
Does anyone know how to install a Samsung CLP-320 printer on a MBP running Monterey? The Samsung printer drivers don't seem to work for Monterey and the Universal version doesn't work for the CLP-320.
However, I know it can work as I have a MBP 2015 updated to Monterey and the printer works fine. I have had this machine a while so when the drivers were installed it would have been on an earlier macOS version.
Do you have access to an older PC? If so, you could try to download and install an appropriate (free) Desktop version of Ubuntu on that machine, in order to make it a print server. There are Samsung CLP-320 drivers for Linux (Ubuntu) from HP. Ubuntu is using CUPS. A printer (such as the CLP-320) could be connected to a USB port on the Ubuntu PC. Then this printer could be configured to be shared (only a few steps). An Ubuntu PC can handle Bonjour (mDNS/Avahi), and a shared printer should thus be recognised by Mac computers on a network. Connect the Ubuntu PC via Ethernet to the network (one of the LAN ports of a Wi-Fi router) and try to print from the new Mac. Would this work?
You could also try to set up USB printer sharing on a Mac running an older version of Mac OS X/OS X/macOS, and connect that computer to the network (if possible, via Ethernet to one of the LAN ports of the Wi-Fi router). Then check what happens if you try to print via the network from the macOS Monterey Mac (check whether the printer appears as a Bonjour printer in the Print dialogue).
I have a Samsung CLX-3185FN (part of the CLX-3180 Series) printer. It was working fine on my MacBook Pro running macOS Big Sur 11.6.4, which has been upgraded over several years through successive macOS versions.
In addition, the download on the Apple website Samsung Printer Drivers v2.6 for OS X (AU) for "Samsung Printer Drivers v2.6 for OS X" gives me the error message "This volume does not meet the requirements for this update", same issue as @drfunkuk.
I have another, older Mac running Catalina. I tried navigating to /Library/Printers, copying both the PPDs and Samsung folders from there to my MacBook Pro, resetting the Printing System from System Preferences, and then adding the printer.
Now, the driver is found by macOS - but I get an error upon adding the printer that tells me "The software for the printer was installed incorrectly", which persists regardless of whether I re-run a reset of the printing system or a First Aid in Disk Utility to fix permissions.
It is ridiculous that this printer worked perfectly fine on Big Sur before I wiped the hard disk, it works perfectly fine on Catalina currently, it works fine under Windows... but not on a fresh install of macOS Big Sur.
Thank you for the information. Actual drivers inside a package may or may not work with a modern operating system, but one problem can also be the installer itself and its system version detection. Unfortunately, a mere transfer of printer driver components from one machine to another is often not feasible.
It is really not acceptable that a printer is prevented from working with a new computer just because of the way the operating system was installed, especially not when the same printer could be used with an earlier computer model running the same operating system version. It ought to be possible for a computer manufacturer controlling the operating system to facilitate continued use of existing printers. Not all printers are AirPrint-models. A computer buyer cannot be expected to throw away older, functional printers.
It is also worth noting that the Samsung Xpress C480FW is listed in About AirPrint - Apple Support as a model supporting Apple's AirPrint technology. This means that printing should not require an extra driver, provided that the C480FW and the Mac computer are connected to the same network. AirPrint works with wireless (Wi-Fi) or wired (Ethernet) network connections, so you could choose to wire this printer by Ethernet to one of the LAN ports of the Wi-Fi router (instead of connecting wirelessly), if you so wish. This way, some of the difficulties related to Wi-Fi may be avoided.
I have a Xpress C480FW Samsung printer. The software 'easy printer manager' disappeared. I tried the universal drivers, and the basic hp recommended drivers. I can open and document and print because the printer is on the WiFi. But no longer have the software in applications to allow scanning, disappeared. Contacted Samsung who said they sold to HP, contacted HP, they said they don't support it. It's probably a macos release problem. Does anyone have a solution> I'm using Ventura 13.6
I have been fiddling with debian based dist on servers for several years but not on the desktop. For servers is sort of the best solution but on the desktop ?
On the desktop I'm starting to hate it.
Nothing is working out of the box. My first fight was how I should connect to my ms machine at work. I wanted a better experience then you can have with vnc so I started to test several other solution. Was fighting with splashtop for a long time but ended up in Remmina (rdp).
So here I'm with printer issue. On samsung page you can download their samsung-unified-driver but I will not install due some error that it can't find cups to restart it.
Could this be initd vs systemd issue ?
Presumably you did read the arch wiki page at ? There is also the splix package that may work instead of relying on the samsung unified driver. I have a different Samsung printer and use splix. I do have to admit that I have been having some issues since cups 2.0 was released. What I find now is that in general I need to restart the cups service using (as root)
Also by default the cups service runs as a socket activated service now so it is org.cups.cupsd.socket that is enabled at boot and in principle it should start the org.cups.cupsd.service when a printer is plugged in.
If you start the service org.cups.cupsd as above, and then also try to start the service you found for your printer (systemctl restart configur...@usb-007-004.service as root) and then unplug your printer, wait a few seconds, and then plug it back in, does the cups service then see the printer? Check on a browser by going to the url localhost:631 and check on the printers tab. Depending on which desktop environment you are running you may be able to configure your printer from the settings (eg in kde under the menu at bottom left going to system settings then printers should allow you to check the setup for your printer). I have not used the samsung unified printers for a long time but I did find that I needed to pull out the samsung raster driver file and put it in the right place - in my case they are:
If you place those two files ( of course the raster and ppd files for your printer model), and then start the services above, you might be able to then set up the printer from the settings menu and tell it to use the splix drivers if you have the splix package installed (pacman -S splix though I note you are using yaourt).
Once you have the printer going with individual steps then of course it would be nice to get it running from boot or when the printer is plugged in without the need to mess with restarting systemd services - I am still fiddling with the latter for my machine!
(as root) do you get any failed services - if so it is possible that replugging the printer may have got the usb connection with a different numerical part and you may need to restart the service if it has a different name ( configur...@usb-008-004.service, say) - in which case make sure that is started.
This kind of problem chasing is frustrating but not all printers work immediately out of the box. I think that there remain some bugs in the newly released version of cups so more work will perhaps be needed - the first step is to do research, then ask for help in the forum or mailing list, and if there are problems that are beyond configuration errors then file bugs and things will get fixed.
By the way it is always worth doing a daemon reload if you change any of the service unit files or other config files for running services. Sometimes rebooting is needed to get daemons running properly after a change too.
It may also be worth googling for any bugs reported for this printer in arch linux. Arch is a distro where people get to know their system in a more intimate way than for some other distros - people will generally help where they can in this forum, and there is often a lot of info available in the wiki, as well as in the arch bug reports.
I think there may be a bug since the configur...@usb-007-00X.service with X incrementing each time you replug the printer is not sensible but occurs. However I don't know if the problem lies with cups or with systemd or somewhere else (like udev, which is linked to systemd). I certainly don't have a printer that works by simply turning it on either and have to fiddle just like you - however it seems that even if you get the services started correctly by using systemctl to restart the service listed above with the correct sequence number that you have not been able to access the drivers - at least I can get mine to run once all the services are started! It might be a good time to file a bug report on flyspray ( )
I begun to try to uninstall thoose package. To remove foomatic I had to remove hplib. One thing here that is odd is that you will not find it by typing hplib in pacmanXG. But if you start to type hpl you will see hplib ver 3.15.2-3.
Go figure ....
This one has been driving me crazy, but I've finally found a really, really simple solution to getting the Samsung ML-1670 running on a Mac running Catalina. This solution may also work for other unsupported Samsung printers, but I've not tested it.
I've no idea why the ML-1860 works but it definitely does; I've actually used this driver for powering our ML-1670 for many years before encountering these latest issues with Catalina. I'm not very familiar with Samsung laser printers but I guess they were very similar.
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