Yes, you read right. There’s a spiffy new Mac Powerbook running the Panther OS at Casa Passwords.
I’m stumped on two things - first is connecting to our wireless network. How can I make it just connect to my network when I turn it on? Every time, I have to hit the Airport icon and select my network. I’m thinking I may have found something that Windows does better - on WinXP, I can simply set it and forget it to use only one specific net.
Another problem is printing to an HP inkjet that’s on an XP box. Apple doesn’t provide a driver for the particular model, and I can’t install the printer software on the Mac unless it’s plugged in via USB - it can’t comprehend networks, and HP’s official position is that it can’t be shared on a network. Printer in question is an HP PSC2210 “all in one” - I have been able to make it sort of work by telling the Mac to print to a Deskjet 1200, but the print quality isn’t great and the speed is terrible. Again, XP does this much, much better - the machine the printer’s plugged into will happily squirt the drivers over to another XP box on the network, and no Samba hijinks are needed.
With regards to the ease with which Windows does these things, am I just missing something on the Mac?
If anyone can get me printing and automatically connected to the network, I’ll be very happy!
In your network settings, choose the option to connect to a specific network for your default location. Can’t be more specific; on XP box right now.
Is the printer directly on the XP computer? Is the XP computer professional? You can install Unix Print Services on the XP box, and then set up the printer in the Mac Print Center using the advanced options, probably using a CUPS driver that is built in. Or you could temporarily connect the printer to the Mac to install the official HP driver. Again, I can’t be too much more specific, but it may be something for you to go on for now.
In the long run, a dedicated print server may be a good idea, that way the WinXP box won’t have to be on in order to print from your Mac. I have an old, parallel HP JetDirect, but I think there are new, fancy USB print servers these days.
You WON’T have to follow these instructions, but it may be an interesting read. Before Apple fixed their OS X print system, this was the only way for a lot of us to print to our networked printers!
I’m stumped on two things - first is connecting to our wireless network. How can I make it just connect to my network when I turn it on? Every time, I have to hit the Airport icon and select my network. I’m thinking I may have found something that Windows does better - on WinXP, I can simply set it and forget it to use only one specific net.
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I have this same problem on an iMac G5 with a Linksys 802.11b wireless router. And with all due respect Balthisar, I in Network Preferences I set my default network and I still don’t auto-connect. I gave up on this a while ago and now I live with clicking the airport icon everytime I wake the Mac from sleep, but it is very annoying. I also assumed it was because I had a non-airport network, or that my keychain settings were wrong or something, but it just doesn’t work.
Yep. It’s directly plugged in via USB to an XP Pro box. On the Mac, I’m using a driver labled something along the lines of “DeskJet 1200C+CUPS+GIMP” and had to give it the secret handshake to enable the option to set up Windows printing via Samba and enter something like “username:password@workgroup/server/devicesharename”
I did at least learn that “Generic” in Apple terms means PostScript, rather than PCL, and my printer did not care for that one bit!
I tried plugging the printer into the Mac, and was able to install its software, but the software does not allow networking or sharing. It’s an obese application that does OCR, fax, memory slots, scanning, copying and printing. Installing it did not result in a new driver popping up in the menu of available choices. I removed the 85 meg behemoth since I won’t have the printer plugged into the Mac. (Frighteningly, that’s about half the size of the Windows version.)
On the Airport side, I went over to the local Apple store just now, and found out that being forced to pick a network is an *intended * behavior whenever more than one network is present. Bah.
Printing used to be worse? eek. It was an interesting read, and tucked away somewhere in there was a link to linuxprinting.org and hpijs.
Took more diddling than one would ever expect, but it does work. The printhead moves a good bit faster and the quality is a lot better.
But really, for a computer sold on the premise of “it just works” you’re right - printing in OS X is busted. Especially if you’re printing to a funky device on a Windows box via wireless.
Mounting disk images, sudo, su, authenticating as administrator? - Had I known I was going to be a Unix sysadmin, I’d have just bought a Sparcstation. Oh well. I’m sure it will be splendid from here on.
Glad it’s working out for you now. The how-to doesn’t include how to use CUPS – I stopped maintenance on the document when CUPS and the new print system came out. If CUPS doesn’t work, then the printer is just way, way too strange to want to use, I think.
Really, I think the root of the problem lie with HP in this case, not with Apple, assuming your OS X is up to date.
Oh, I said WON’T have to use the article 'cos of CUPS. I forgot to mention something mega-important: CUPS has a built in server on your OS X box that should negate the need to be a sysadmin, even with your HP printer on the XP box. You can configure it all at http://127.0.0.1:631.