Linux drivers for a Dell 1235CN printer - kudos to Samsung

I purchased a Dell 1235CN laser multi-function printer, which arrived today. Unfortunately Fedora 12 doesn't know about the printer, so this lead me to the inevitable search for the right drivers.

I found a post by someone who had the same problem. She/he had called Dell support who told her/him that Dell did not support Linux for that printer, but that the printer is actually a rebadged Samsung CLX-3175 printer.

I visited the Samsung web site and was really happy to see that Samsung to a great job of supporting their printers on Windows, Mac and Linux. I was able to download a Linux tarball that contained the necessary drivers wrapped up in an easy to use installer.

http://www.samsung.com/au/consumer/print-solutions/print-multifunctions-copiers/colour-multifunction/CLX-3175FN/XSA/index.idx?pagetype=prd_detail&tab=support

After installing the tarball my printer was working.

Thanks to the people at Samsung! Excellent work for your top class Linux support.

VMWare MKS Console Plugin - problem and solution

While messing around with a beta service from Melbourne IT called vCloud Express, that is based on VMWare, I was frustrated that I could not get the VMWare MKS console plugin to work in Firefox on Fedora 12.

I tracked down a forum post that showed me how to run it from the command line:

~/.mozilla/firefox/.default/extensions/VMwareMKSPlugin\@vmware.com/plugins/viewer

This was very useful because I showed that I was missing a number of old shared libraries on which the VMWare console plugin relies: libexpat.so.0 and libstdc++.so.5.

It was then a simple matter of installing the two RPMS: compat-expat1 and compat-libstdc++-33.