[wellylug] GDI Printers on Linux

[Peter Dawson]

	This might be old news, but I have always been under the impression that GDI printers were to avoided like the plague because their drivers were proprietary and not open, thus they were not supported on Linux.

    Well, I was looking for a cheap laser printer, and in my searching I saw a Samsung SCX-4100 MFP which looked pretty neat and at a good price point, so I had a closer look...

    Yup! Host based printing (i.e. GDI or some such), but a little further down the specs, support was provided for Linux - specifically for dead-rat and similar rpm based distros, but I thought "what the heck, I can always send it back as not fit for purpose if it doesn't work", so I splurged.

    Now the interesting bit is that I only have Debian on my machines, but lo and behold, once the necessary underpinnings were in place (cups & sane) the install went off without a hitch, apart from complaining that it couldn't find sane and making various (non-fatal) rude noises about things apparently missing (which I ignored on the basis that leaving it to run to completion was the path of least pain), and now I have a working scanner & GDI printer running under Debian.
    And with a nice graphical controller as well.

    While the printer has parallel & USB interfaces, only the USB interface works under Linux.

    F Y I

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