IP printing in leopard

J

jxr

Registered
Hello,

I have an Epson stylus photo 870 hooked up to a print server and it works just fine under Tiger, with the Gimp driver. I got my son a new macbook with leopard and after downloading the gutenprint drivers, and setting up the printer the operation fails after printing 100% saying that the printer is busy, and then keeps retrying.

Is it possible to get the driver from tiger to work in leopard, and if so how ?
OR
is there a fix to this problem ?

Thanks,
Joe.
 
Leopard broke my Epson print driver. I went to Epson.com and downloaded new driver. All's well now.
 
I feel fairly certain this isn't a driver problem but a setup one. The Gutenprint driver is a CUPS driver which is required in order to use the CUPS built-in IP print protocols.
It's also important to know which IP protocol to use with your model of print server, and to know what details are important. The IP > LPD and IPP protocols are international standards and both REQUIRE a queue name (also called port name) in order to identify the physical port that the printer is connected to (because the concept of print server means many printers can be served at one IP address). You have most likely not entered a queue name in Printer Setup. You can find it in the print server manual, especially if there are setup instructions for unix or Windows NT- where there's less effort to hide details from users.

If your print server supports HP Jetdirect (also called TCP/IP raw or port 9100 or socket printing), that one doesn't use queue name, because it uses a port number (9100) to distinguish ports.

HTH
 
Thats exactly how I have it set up from my linux box, printing on port 9100.

I have changed the protocol to LPD and now everything works just fine in leopard.

Thanks for pointing it out.
 
Sorry for jumping in on an old thread. I am trying to print to my offices network printer (HP2300N). I have put in the proper IP address using LPD and chosen the HP2300 driver but I still get the "busy" message. What can I do?
Thanks.
 
The queue name is required for built-in jetdirect network cards for the LPD protocol. It can be "ps" for a postscript-only queue/printer; "auto" to allow the card to accept both postscript and PCL; or "raw" to allow the card to pass through anything without checking the input.

If they've set a unique queue name in the jetdirect card, you can get that from printing a config page.

IP printer > Jetdirect is the preferred protocol choice because it gives bidirectional comm back to the computer. (No queue name is used for HP Jetdirect protocol)
 
Last edited:
Thanks for your input. I'm not 100% sure I understand everything you wrote but I will go back to the office to play with it. I know that when I have set-up WinTel pc's to print on the network, I set up an IP port with the printer's ip address and it uses port 9100 and a "PCL" driver. Does this info help?
 
port 9100 equals HP Jetdirect protocol on OS X.
The driver from HP (included in OS X) is a postscript one.
 
Hello,

I am having a similar but possibly more complicated problem , I have a few Mac OSX machines, and a ton of windows machines that i am responsable for, i am barely familiar with Mac's. I have a canon imagepress copier that we had installed recently. I have a share setup for the windows machines and everything works fine. I tried getting the mac machines to connect to the imagepress server , but it states that the printer is busy when i know it is not , Using IP address to connect. If i connect them through the Default option it somehow finds the copier , and it will print, but they can't access alot of the features of the copier, like the color adjustments , or even something basic like the supply levels. Thanks for the help
 
I've never used a Canon Imagepress Copier, so I may not have the answer...
If you read what I wrote above, you'll know that "Using IP address to connect" doesn't quite tell us all we need to know. These details are hidden by Windows installers, but on Macs (and linux) we need to also know comm protocol and queue name, where required.

Also, do you know if the copier has the postscript add-on, or not? The drivers provided by Canon probably assume that if you're printing from a Mac, you must want postscript. OS X can print other than postscript, but it reduces manufacturers' bottom line, so they don't provide non-postscript drivers for high-end printers.
 
I have just spoken to the kindly folks at HP and they inform me that the 2300 drivers are only compatible with Mac OS up to 10.4. In particular, 10.5 is not supported.

If you look at their downloads web page you will see that the most recent set of drivers was released in 2003. HP tell me that they will be updating the drivers to support 10.5 but they have no idea when this will happen because the printer is such an old model. Put more simply: you are screwed until we get round to it but can't tell you when that will be.

Actually my problem is a bit different from what you guys had. I can print from Omnigraffle, Safari and Preview to my 2300dn. However, when I try to print from MS-Office, Eudora, Filemaker or Textedit the application quits the moment I hit the print button in the print dialog box. Lovely! And I thought it was me. Indeed, I went through the following before getting round to calling HP:
– Reinstallation of OSX 10.5
– Fixing all permissions on my hard disk
– Reinstalling the HP printer drivers
– Reinstalling MS-Office

Of course what makes me really mad is that as part of the 10.5 re-installation I wiped all my data. you know how it is you are a bit cross and trying to get others things done because the bloody printer won't behave and you don't concentrate sufficiently on the installation dialog boxes... Not disastrous because I was backed up. The back was 6 days ago and I've only lost a bit of data but even so...grrrgnnnhhhhh!!!!

I waited for more than a year to upgrade from 10.4 to 10.5 to avoid most of these terrors – clearly I did not wait long enough. I do have an Epson 1290 which seems to work fine under 10.5 but the 2300dn is (has been?) my main workhorse.

The result: A huge black mark for HP, and I think I'm going to send them to the naughty step for quite a while. Actually, I'm pretty mad about it all because 10.5 was released in October nearly 22 months ago and the 2300 series was part of the core printer range.
 
For your model (a postscript and PCL printer), you should try the Gutenprint and hpijs alternative drivers:
http://www.openprinting.org/show_printer.cgi?recnum=HP-LaserJet_2300dn
http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net/MacOSX.php
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/OpenPrinting/MacOSX/hpijs

When you say the HP driver isn't compatible, I'm quite sure this is only the print menu plugins/PDEs for special print features that isn't working. I guess that printing works just fine with a generic postscript driver, too.
 
simonhulse said:
... Indeed, I went through the following before getting round to calling HP:
– Reinstallation of OSX 10.5
– Fixing all permissions on my hard disk
– Reinstalling the HP printer drivers
– Reinstalling MS-Office

...
Click to expand...
You prescribed the wrong medicine and didn't cure the patient. Reinstalling the OS is virtually never the cure for a problem on your Mac. The fact that your computer printed just fine from some of your apps is strong evidence that your OS was fine before you replaced it.

HP has become somewhat mercurial over the last decade. Its lack of MacOS X 10.5 support for your printer, however, it not a problem. Support for the LaserJet 2300 is as close as a download and installation of Gutenprint.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top