Installing Samsung M2020 printer with Linux Mint

[soldar]

When I recommend Linux to Windows users and they say they hate the command line and spending hours trying to install a driver... and I say nah, it's not like that any more.

I am running Linux Mint 20 (Ubuntu) and I have a Samsung M2020 printer connected to the Windows computer but I have to boot up Windows just to print a page. So, about once a year I think I am going to connect the printer to the Linux computer... and I soon remember that I tried it before and after much frustration I gave up. And I end up printing with Windows. And realizing those who criticize Linux for this are right in this case.

Yesterday I spent some hours but had to give up. I have searched high and low and tried a bunch of things but it just won't work. Many pages with cryptic instructions linking to pages which no longer exist and warning you have to uninstall any driver files which might be there but with no way of knowing what they are and how to get rid of them The kind of Linux people complain about.

So, in case someone knows the trick or feels like helping here is what I aim trying to connect:

Desktop: Cinnamon 4.8.6, Linux Mint 20.1 Ulyssa , (base: Ubuntu 20.04 )
Printer: Samsung Xpress SL-M2020

I understand Samsung printers was bought by HP so now are HP and HP has no interest in supporting them and much less in Linux.

[themadhippy]

Does it connect via wifi? On ubuntu with a brother printer all i had to do was make sure the printer is connected to the network and it just appears in the printer list,nothing extra needed.

[soldar]

No WIFI. USB printer. With Windows plug it in and it works. With Linux it does recognize it as Samsung M2020 but that's it.

[RoGeorge]

Don't have that printer, can not say if it can be used from Linux or not.

Since you print only once in a while, create a Windows virtual machine inside Linux, and install the windows drivers for your printer inside the virtual machine, and let the Windows VM to handle the printer and share it over LAN (to your Linux host only).

When you want to print, start the Windows VM first (takes only a few seconds), then print from Linux to the shared printer handled by the Windows virtual machine.  Use the oldest possible Windows that still has drivers for your printer, WinXP if possible (to keep the VM small and fast), and isolate the VM from Internet, so you won't have to deal with unwanted updates/upgrades/other Windows annoyances or vulnerabilities.

[shapirus]

Yeah. Peripheral hardware support in Linux sucks. Sad but true.

[themadhippy]

Peripheral hardware support in Linux sucks.

Yep,my motherboard requires a driver for the network port to work in windows,meanwhile on Linux it just works straight out the box

[RoGeorge]

These guys are saying there is a Linux driver for Samsung M2020:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/645681/samsung-m2020-on-ubuntu

[voltsandjolts]

I plugged in HP mono ethernet laser to a linux machine, and as I was wondering how I was going to get this installed, the 'printer ready' message popped up. Easier than it was on Window's which wants to install all the 'helpful' software which can assist with ordering printer supplies (no thank).

Regarding OP problem, some folks say installing libcupsimage2 has helped with some samsung printers.

[madires]

Use CUPS and the PPD from https://github.com/rogovskyyy/cups_m2026_x64/tree/main.

[shapirus]

Peripheral hardware support in Linux sucks.

Yep,my motherboard requires a driver for the network port to work in windows,meanwhile on Linux it just works straight out the box

There's always a driver for Windows, even if it's not in the base system.

If there's no driver for Linux, which is a frequent case for peripherals, or the driver was released once, some, say, 10 years ago, and it's linked against libs that no longer exist, you're pretty much out of luck.

[soldar]

Don't have that printer, can not say if it can be used from Linux or not.

Well, I have found threads saying they succeeded but they were all quite convoluted and I never managed to get it to work.

The configuration GUI lists it as Text only and when I go to the next screen to see if I can change it it just hangs and is stuck there.

For now I will leave it as it is, on the Windows XP computer. The thing is some months from now I will forget and try again as I have already done several times.

[themadhippy]

if youve tried multiple times it maybe worth doing a fresh install of mint to purge any lingering traces of previous attempts,

[madires]

The configuration GUI lists it as Text only and when I go to the next screen to see if I can change it it just hangs and is stuck there.

Simply download the PPD file from the github repo (see above) and select "Provide PPD file".

[soldar]

Simply download the PPD file from the github repo (see above) and select "Provide PPD file".

That is precisely what I could not do because the GUI dialog froze. It turns out that there is a bug reported at
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1344315/change-driver-dialog-for-printer-hangs
and a fix provided at https://launchpad.net/~ikuya-fruitsbasket/+archive/ubuntu/scp

With that I did manage to configure the correct PPD for the printer and it is now printing correctly. At least the single page I printed went OK.

Well, persistence paid off but I can understand people who complain about Linux being this complicated.

[Nominal Animal]

Well, persistence paid off but I can understand people who complain about Linux being this complicated.

Yup.

The things you need are 1) a working CUPS installation, including libcupsimage2 (the raster image handling support); 2) the correct PPD for the printer; and 3) correct permissions (udev rule) for the USB interface.

Companies that bother to provide an "installer" for these usually hire either highschoolers or Windows specialists to do this thing, so they work hard on an installer application... when just the files alone would be more useful than any installer.  Files plus installation instructions would be near-optimal.

In Linux in general, all support depends on volunteers.  Those who do volunteer for this kind of stuff typically do so because they maintain dozens if not hundreds of printers for an organization, and are just making their own work easier by sharing it with others.  Very few single-printer users bother to contribute anything, which is why such use is so complicated.

For a non-Linux related comparison, just try to find an affordable laser printer with easily available affordable replacement ink/powder cassettes.  Either you'll just give up and decide on one that you deem cheap enough, or you'll do the equivalent amount of work than discovering how to install that printer in Linux, in a spreadsheet comparing hardware prices, cassette prices per printed page at average coverage, and so on.  The only difference is that for Linux, you don't have the "I give up, I pick .. uh .. that one" option.

TL;DR: Yes, but not because Linux is inherently complicated.  It's just how things are right now, because of what humans and companies have focused on.

[Infraviolet]

"Yeah. Peripheral hardware support in Linux sucks. Sad but true."
Honestly, it's less that than
"Yeah, printer hardware always sucks. They just try to make it suck a little less under Windows by making drivers, but then they get outdated and fail on later windows versions sooner or later anyway"
and it really is printers specifically, most other peripheral hardware today is standardised enough it happily works with Linux.

It is quite an irony that when I last upgraded Linux, to Mint 21, it took 2 minutes to get my toolchain set up to prepare files for my 3d printer, but 2 days of tinkering to get the canon "drivers" for my paper printer to behave themselves, and I still don't know quite how they ended up working eventually.

[madires]

With IPP Everywhere the printer driver issues are becoming a thing of the past (OS doesn't matter). I don't have an overview of current printers, but most should support IPP Everywhere meanwhile.

[Gyro]

Experiences with peripherals seem to vary greatly. I never thought I'd manage the transition to Linux at my age but most stuff has been pretty transparent for me. After installng Mint, once I had worked out that I needed to install CUPS, I had my Dell networked Laser working in less than hour of inexperienced prodding. The biggest challenge was finding out that it was a re-badged Xerox.

My old but perfectly serviceable Cannon scanner, which hadn't worked on windows since XP, just plugged in and worked immediately via IPP, no drivers required.

If all else fails, virtual machines work painlessly under Virtualbox. Dragging and dropping files into a windows VM to be printed from there may not be the most elegant solution, but is an option if you completely fail to get a peripheral driver working under Linux. Windows only device s/w, such as the Peak DCA75pro work seamlessly in a VM with transparent USB pass-through.


P.S. After doing something very silly with my VMs partition at the weekend, I had to reinstall my Win7 pro VM from scratch. The Microsoft standalone automated voice activation freephone number is still up and working (I hadn't seen a reference to anyone using this for a few years).

[soldar]

In general I am quite satisfied with Linux Mint and the problem in this case turned out to be a bug in the configuration process which would freeze. Had it not been for that bug the printer would have been working very easily and in no time.

I assume the configuration screen that freezes is part of the CUPS thing. I do not think it has anything to do with the specific printer or its files. It is just that the configuration file where I should select the printer file froze.

I do not know if this bug has been corrected in later versions.

[madires]

I assume the configuration screen that freezes is part of the CUPS thing. I do not think it has anything to do with the specific printer or its files. It is just that the configuration file where I should select the printer file froze.

That should be part of the desktop environment. CUPS is managed mainly via its embedded webserver (you can also use a shell command or edit cfg files).

BTW, if CUPS causes problems with serial devices and you don't have any printer with a serial interface, you can disable the scanning of serial devices by changing the file access rights of /lib/cups/backend/serial (or by removing that file). AFAIK, this isn't documented. In my case CUPS screwed up the interface settings for a DCF77 (longwave time signal) receiver.

[radiolistener]

All my attempts to use Mint and Ubuntu was failed due to problems with drivers. They periodically broken with next apt update and needs to fix compilation errors manually. This is real nightmare, because some apt upgrade may turn your machine into non usable state and you're needs to spend some days to fix it. And Linux Mint was broken after next apt upgrade in that way so there is no way to fix something and no way to install/uninstall some package.

In addition I found that Nvidia driver for Ubuntu and Mint don't supports OpenCL HW acceleration for my GTX460.

So, I returned to Linux Arch... It works great and has HW accelerated OpenCL support...

[Postal2]

.... OpenCL HW acceleration for my GTX460.  ....

This LSI's assembler has not bit-oriented commands. I recommend GT730 (or any Kepler).