Samsung sells the Samsung CLX-3160FN network printer as Linux compliant. It is indeed packaged with their Unified Linux Driver on CD. Just in case you didn’t receive it, the whole package can be found on their download center. However, using this original driver will result in poor print quality, especially for text documents. So the good news is that Samsung knows Linux exists. They even considers it important enough to let the marketing people know they have done something special to make their products work on it. The bad one is that the driver is so crappy it’s not even usable to print a simple text document, so here is how to make it work much better.

Instead of the original driver from Samsung, you will have to use foo2qpdl, an open source print driver designed for the CLX-3160 printer.

The installation takes only a few lines:

$ wget -O foo2zjs.tar.gz http://foo2zjs.rkkda.com/foo2zjs.tar.gz
$ tar zxf foo2zjs.tar.gz
$ cd foo2zjs
$ make
$ ./getweb 3160     # Get Samsung CLX-3160 .ICM files
$ sudo make install
$ sudo make cups    #Restart cupsd

Now you can browse to http://localhost:631/ or use the GUI provided by your distro for configuring you printer settings. In the driver database, you will find a new model called Samsung CLX-3160 Foomatic/foo2qpdl.

The author of the driver advises you to configure two distinct printers, one for monochrome printing and the other one for colour printing (changes have to made in the Printer Options tab). So I assume that if you print black text with the printer configured for colour printing, the text will be printed in black by mixing colours instead of using the black cartridge. However, looking at the pages printed with the driver provided by Samsung, it was probably mixing colours also.

If you know more about this, please leave a comment.