Samsung CLX-3305 with Ubuntu 12.04

Posted on One min read

Samsung CLX-3305 is a multifunction printer with an embedded scanner. While the printer component is perfectly managed by Ubuntu, the scanner doesn’t get automatically recognized. This is due to a missing piece of configuration in the /etc/sane.d/xerox_mfp.conf file which is the configuration file of the SANE backend able to support Samsung scanners (despite the name suggesting Xerox multifunction printers).

The information we must add is the ID of the multifunction printer which we can get using lsusb:

$ lsusb | grep Samsung
Bus 002 Device 005: ID 04e8:3456 Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd

The ID is 04e8:3456 which is a couple of hexadecimal numbers. All we need to do is add this couple of numbers to the configuration, using this simple command:

sudo echo "usb 0x04e8 0x3456" >> /etc/sane.d/xerox_mfp.conf

Now try to use xsane or some other SANE scanning frontend. The Samsung scanner should be automatically detected.

This tecnique is very often all we have to do to add a generic USB device to the list of devices supported by a driver, including printers, storage and other USB product classes.