I have a Samsung SCX-4200 Printer/Scanner it works rather nicely and I like it alot, even though I don’t use it often. Tonight I plugged it into my Ubunut machine and it printed first time, with no setups. Unfortunately the scanner didn’t work.

A few quick search’s revealed this forum entry on the Ubuntu Forums and from there I found this site with .deb packages for the Samsung Unified MFP drivers. After installing the packages the scanner suddenly work in XSane and I could scan. I’m really like the fact that more and more hardware “just works” now in Linux, or works with minimal tweaking. I haven’t had to compile a kernel or any other software in a very long time.

After getting the scanner to work I found 2 nice apps to use instead of XSane, the first is flegita a nice little app that makes it easy to scan things from the scanner to png, jpg, tif and PDF and the other app is gscan2pdf which allows you to scan to pdf.