I tried to install our new laser printer, a Samsung CLP-600 on my linux machine. The first problem was that the printer uses a proprietary printing language called SPL, Samsung printing language. After some minutes of googling I found splix, a free SPL driver. Samsung also offers a linux drivers for its printers, but they only distribute binary and old drivers that have some limitations. The printer is accessed via a windows machine (using samba) which seems to work quite well with cups. However, the only thing it printed was a page that tells me "SPL-C ERROR - Please use the proper driver".
After having read Johannes' blog post I actually felt a bit fooled. I then got into contact with the splix developer on #splix on freenode who told me that our model is most probably too recent. The Samsung guys seem to have changed some compression algorithm which he needs to reverse engineer. I hope he succeeds eventually. Unfortunately I cannot really help with that since I have no experience in this area at all.
The installation on my Windows Notebook went fine however. The only thing was that it did not discover the printer automatically but I needed to tell it the IP address and Share Name of the machine directly connected to the printer; probably because there is another router between the notebook and the rest of the home network. After that, it copied the necessary drivers and stuff automatically through the network onto the notebook, I needed no more click to make the printer ready which I found quite impressive.
