Sysadmin Field Notes

September 17, 2006

So now I needed to get my wife's MacBook printing to our printers, which I was dreading given my past terrible experiences This I thought should be the easiest of all right? No more weird Windows bonjour drivers to get going, and since I'm already setup for sure to share via bonjour on my computer, should be cake right?

Sigh.

The laserjet 5p setup went fine (install foomatic hpijs drivers from linuxprinting.org and ghostscript, setup as IP printer). Same as on my system.

So for the office jet 6110, bonjour found the printer just fine. yay! Except the driver said "Unknown". That doesn't bode well. I picked the same shared definition I used before, the weird local queue I had to setup pointing at the usb port instead of /dev/null, otherwise with Windows bonjour I just got blank pages.

So "unknown" seemed unlikely to work, and indeed it did not. No weird errors in any logs that I could see, just "Error while printing" appearing when trying to print from little old text edit. After about 10 minutes of vainly trying to figure out how the change the driver for this printer definition manually (which for some reason, everywhere I tried to change it, the drop down was greyed out and disabled), I decided to try the "regular," local printer definition on my box.

That worked right out of the gate. Why do windows and Mac OS bonjour drivers behave differently? Don't care I guess since it's working now. Maybe the actual printing protocol implementation on Mac is smart enough to get it to the right place, whereas something goes strange in the windows implementation. It's all very dark, creepy, and undocumented.

By far the most terrible place within Mac OS X is setting up printers. Of course, maybe it would be better using non-HP printers, since the laser jet is too old to be easy anymore, and the officeJet was produced after HP turned to complete crap.