Steve Jobs ate my homework

[libertango]

There I was, yesterday, about 30 minutes away from picking akirlu up from the train and then going on to my Chinese class. We were supposed to do a skit in class, and I'd cleverly organized the other two students so we'd worked on it via email. Now it was time to print it out, so I'd have a reading copy for class.

So I went into GMail, prepared to print, and...

...found my Samsung ML-1210 printer had disappeared, as far as my Mac was concerned.

Power cycle the thing, no joy. Start Googling... and found out the ML-1210 was one of the printers whose support had been dropped by Apple in the Snow Leopard upgrade even if you'd had a perfectly valid driver installed for Leopard.

I went to class without a printout, having run out of time. Fortunately, one of my classmates is also a bright fellow, and printed out extra copies.

*^*^*

In case someone runs into the same problem, and needs a workaround for this specific printer:

The Linux Foundation (of all places) has drivers that appear to work with the Samsung ML-1210 printer and Snow Leopard.

NB: You need the three files shown there, Samsung-GDI, Foomatic-RIP, and Ghostscript. However, they should be installed in the reverse order they're shown on the page, thus:

* First, Ghostscript 8.64

* Followed by Foomatic-RIP 4.0.2

* And finally, Samsung-GDI 1.816.2

Why they're not listed on the page in the order they need to be installed is one of life's enduring mysteries. It probably has to do with the Linux Philosophy: If it was easy, anyone could do it, and as few people as possible should be using Linux/*NIX, n'est-ce pas?

Comments

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

Shite!

(Apologies for the Anglo-Saxon, but a tech hurdle of that magnitude seems deserving.)

[hal-obrien.livejournal.com]

Enh. It is and it isn't a tech hurdle. That is, the actual steps aren't that difficult or complicated once you know what they are. It's the finding out that takes a while. Which makes this a classic "Unlock Special File Zebra!" problem.