Recently, Meredith said that she wanted to be able to print to our HP inkjet printer from her iBook. I had recently discovered that if I turn on printer sharing on my Windows desktop, which the inkjet is connected to, then I could select that printer from my Windows laptop and print as long as my desktop was on. Wow -- so easy.
I had heard that Jaguar, aka Max OS 10.2, added a bunch of support for Windows networking. And, Apple's 'switch' page includes the statement: "As a result, the Mac is at home on PC networks (or just about any other kind), making the business of sharing files and printers with PCs entirely painless." So, confident that it would be at least as easy to do there as it was on Windows, I headed to her iBook to set it up for her.
Hmm ... well ... none of the choices in Print Center seem to be right. I'll just try a few ... no ... OK. Well, time to Google for this.
Ah, I see. The first problem is that I have to enable SMB printing on the Mac. You can do this by opening the terminal, becoming root, and typing
cd /usr/libexec/cups/backend
ln -s /usr/bin/smbspool /usr/libexec/cups/backend/smb
Then restart the computer, or at least CUPS (the printing system) with kill -HUP.
Yes ... well ... that was, um, not very Mac-like. All the power of Unix, Apple says. Guess all the ease of Unix, too. But fine. Now I can add the printer, right?
Not quite.
Now I can add the printer, and print Postscript via the Windows printer sharing. But we don't have a Postscript printer. So, the one line 'this is a test' document prints as a five-page document full of Postscript. OK, off to the HP site to install the HP Photosmart drivers for Mac OS X.
Oops -- those only support the printer if it is connected via USB or via HP's own JetDirect print server. There's no way to pick that driver for a printer connected any other way.
Hmm.
With some more searching on Google, I found 'GIMP', an open-source print driver architecture for Linux that someone has ported to OS X. First, I had to install 'GhostScript', a Postscript interpreter. The Macintosh, I thought, has a Postscript interpreter (can't Quartz do this?), but, for some reason, GIMP needs its own. Fine. Then, I got to install GIMP.
Finally -- several hours after I started out on this project -- it worked. I could print to the inkjet from Meredith's iBook.
This is easy????????