Samsung ML-1520 printer

A few years ago I purchased a Samsung ML-1520 Laser printer. This is a very basic printer but it’s a laser and ideal for a home office. The prints from it are crisp and it works a treat…. on WINDOWS and LINUX! I purchased this thing in the days when I thought I would never own a Mac. As long as it supported Windows, I didn’t care. However, I now have a 2009 MacBook Pro and am using this for all my admin type tasks. Actually, I’m using it for a whole lot more than admin, but that’s another story.

It turns out that Samsung printers are notorious for not having mac support. This means that I’m screwed right? Apples hype leads people to believe that “you don’t need drivers” well, we all know that’s not true. Everything needs drivers.

Searching for Linux drivers for this printer proved to be a nightmare Samsungs website had no drivers for either Snowlepoard or Lion.

Linux Foundation has some drivers. But when I was looking their site was down. Also the version I was able to find had a problem with the page margin setup. Apparently an older version of one of Foomatic-rip solves that issue.

However I also found Splix. This is a different implementation of a driver, and it works great.