Macs don't find printer drivers

[AylmerQc]

Once more I'm turning to the experts on this one.

I have a Kodak Easyshare G600 printer dock that I've lost the original cd for and with my Imovie problems I've re-installed OSX, which seems to have erased the drivers for that printer,which was working fine prior to that.
No problems I thought, Macs have all the drivers. Not in this case though. So I downloaded the drivers from the Kodak site,proceeded with the installation of the drivers,restarted the MB,  but still I am unable to add this printer because the MacBook can't find the drivers. I've tried it over and over,searched the Apple discussions group but can't find an answer as to why the drivers remain unseen, Anyone have a clue?
Been working on this problem for a few days now..

[Dan Millar]

Kodaks website says to unplug the printer, then re-plug it after installing new drivers. That's not normal, but if that's what it says, then the sequence may be important. The site also mentions that there is a firmware upgrade to 1.0.4 required - do you have that?

If you have OS X 10.2-4, you should be able to simply "Add" a printer in the Printer Setup Utility as you say, but if you don't immediately see your printer listed, Kodak's website says you need to click on "More Printers". In the More Printers window, you may have to select the connection type first, i.e. Kodak USB or something like that. If that doesn't work - your USB cable may be NFG (non-functional garbage - what did you think I meant?).

OS X Leopard is a little different - you add printers through the Printers & Fax pane in the System Preferences. You click the + sign under the printer list area to add a printer, then the printer browser opens just like in Printer Setup Utility, and again you may have to click "More Printers".

Still not working? Have a peek in the System Profiler at the USB connections to see if your printer appears to be connected at all. If nothing shows up, and it's not the cable, try Vista... just kidding. Call Kodak.

Despite the fact that Apple denies there are any problems with printing in Leopard, the users forums are full of printing problems. I think they have patched up most of the problems, and the vendors have finally caught up, so it should be smooth sailing, and Leopard is certainly smooth. To answer your question from another forum posting, in my opinion Leopard is not Vista, in much the same way that an iPod is not a Zune.

Gates got out just in time...

Dan

[AylmerQc]

I managed to get my printer going with my Imac G5 running Tiger. Hadn't been able to do so earlier though.I'm not going to try again with the MB running Leopard anymore. Couldn't update the firmware though. Kodak doesn't seem to have PPC firmware updates for these printers. With  PC running Widows,whenever I had printer or modem problems I often found if I went into Device manager I could delete all the conflicting devices and start all over and that would usually solve my problem. In Leopard I was trying to locate a place where drivers are kept to see if I had more than one install and it was causing problems, seeing that the drivers were there originally and I had downloaded and gone thru the install process quite a # of times.

[Dan Millar]

Don't know if this will help, but while troubleshooting OS X and Windows is similar in many areas, printing is definitely NOT one of them.

OS X doesn't actually use printer drivers in the Windows sense of the term - the drivers are, as you alluded, all "built-in". All you really have to add, if it isn't present, is a printer description file - called a PPD or PostScript Printer Description for your printer.

You can find the PPDs your system has installed (hundreds if you did a default install of OS X) in the folder /Library/Printers/PPDs/Contents/Resources/en.lproj/. Most of the PPDs are compressed in GZIP form, so while they're named printermodel.gz, their uncompressed versions are actually printermodel.ppd. You'll also see folders in the /Library/Printers directory for various printer makes as well - these folders contain additional resources that programs can access through plug-ins, like paper-handling features, etc. So these must be in the right place as well.

Printers can also be installed in your own account - so only you can access them. In that case the printer files live in your user folder's Library. i.e. ~/Library/Printers, where ~ is the current user's name.

Printing in OS X is handled by CUPS (Common Unix Printing System). CUPS is actually a print server and it looks after all spooling and scheduling of print jobs, creation of pages via PostScript, and delivery of final output to devices. CUPS uses IPP (Internet Printing Protocol (don't you love these acronyms?)) by default, but it can also use various "backends" for different connection types, i.e. USB, BonJour, LPD, etc, . So, in theory, all you have to do is supply the PPD, which tells CUPS what your printer's capbilities are, and you should be printing with ease.

The problems begin when vendors use proprietary "flavours" of standard connection types or special backends. For example, my Epson printers print via something called "EPSON USB", which is a custom "backend" for CUPS. I have to select that from the More Printers options if the OS doesn't auto-magically "find" it. If I don't have that - I don't print because the normal USB connection doesn't speak "EPSON USB". Same goes for many other brands - Canon, HP, etc. and I'm guessing - Kodak too?

Don't know if that helps, but it may help you in future troubleshooting.

Happy Mac'ing!

Dan

[ben schmidt]

In Leopard I was trying to locate a place where drivers are kept to see if I had more than one install and it was causing problems, seeing that the drivers were there originally and I had downloaded and gone thru the install process quite a # of times.

Jm,
In Leopard, you can always 'reset' the printing system:

• Open Print & Fax Preference Pane
• Right-Mouse click (or ctrl-click) in the Printers list (column on the left)
• Select Reset printing system...

Mind you, this will delete all the printers you've configured on this Leopard/OS X 10.5 system, but I'm assuming that that would just be this problematic Kodak, and maybe 1 other?

...b

PS. When I add a new printer, I:

• First try printing without adding the new print drivers that came with the printer. OS X ships with well over 1GB of printer drivers already installed, and does offer 'generic' drivers.
• If I decide I want/need to install a new driver (to access special features, say), I go to the vendor's website and download the latest driver. I assume that whatever driver is on the CD was burned onto it months ago, aged well on a ship from the Far East, and then aged some more in a series of warehouses, long before I bring the printer home. <gr>