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Solution for printers that stop working under Lion?

N

NJRonbo

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Jan 10, 2007
3,283
1,321
I have two laser printers.

The newer Brother wireless laser printer works perfectly under Lion.

My older Konica Minolta 5430DL no longer works. That printer is wired through my router network.

My question is, could this just be the absence of a driver yet to be available or is Lion handling printers in a different manner than Snow Leopard?

This is the manner in which I had my Konica set up under Snow Leopard. If I should make any changes to get it to work under Lion please let me know:



Protocol: HP Jet Direct

Address: IP Address from Printer

Print Using: Select Driver from drop-down list
 
This is a quasi non-answer but when Snow Leopard came out and broke my printer drivers I had to wait until Canon (and then apple) updated the drivers to get them to work.

I suspect short of a hack or work around that may be the case for drivers that don't work in Lion.
 
It's quite sad that in the 21st century, printers require special drivers to function. When I plug in my mouse, it works, without drivers. Why can't printers have such functionality? I understand that some special functions - such as telling you how much ink is left, various ink saving modes, standby settings, borderless printing, etc... - require drivers, but what about the basic printing functions? Why can't printers just receive a PDF file from the computer and figure the rest out for themselves?

Drivers are the plague of Windows: you plug in a USB drive, and you instantly get "found new hardware". Drivers make your computer run slow, and crash at random times, as they have access to the system's lowest-level functions. Bad drivers require you to type in your WiFi password each time you exit your screen saver.

On Macs you don't have to worry about that, but printers and scanners still need drivers for some reason.

I had a dream, where hardware can talk to computers using a single, universal language. In that dream, it didn't matter whether your printer was designed for Mac or for Windows, they just worked with both. I wish that one day, our children can keep their perfectly working printer even when they upgrade their OS. I hope that one day, we can forget drivers, for our future depends on it!
 
baryon said:
It's quite sad that in the 21st century, printers require special drivers to function. When I plug in my mouse, it works, without drivers. Why can't printers have such functionality? I understand that some special functions - such as telling you how much ink is left, various ink saving modes, standby settings, borderless printing, etc... - require drivers, but what about the basic printing functions? Why can't printers just receive a PDF file from the computer and figure the rest out for themselves?

Drivers are the plague of Windows: you plug in a USB drive, and you instantly get "found new hardware". Drivers make your computer run slow, and crash at random times, as they have access to the system's lowest-level functions. Bad drivers require you to type in your WiFi password each time you exit your screen saver.

On Macs you don't have to worry about that, but printers and scanners still need drivers for some reason.

I had a dream, where hardware can talk to computers using a single, universal language. In that dream, it didn't matter whether your printer was designed for Mac or for Windows, they just worked with both. I wish that one day, our children can keep their perfectly working printer even when they upgrade their OS. I hope that one day, we can forget drivers, for our future depends on it!
Click to expand...

Every piece of hardware requires some kind of drivers. Mouse is not an exception -> {AppleHIDMouse.kext IOBluetoothHIDDriver.kext AppleHIDKeyboard.kext AppleMikeyHIDDriver.kext} depends on a mouse.

I think printer makers could find a way to standardise some of the basic functions that would be handled by some kind of basic driver (just like mouse or keyboard).
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

PostScript, I heard, is expensive to license.
As for the OP, you could try Gutenprint. It might not work with JetDirect, though.
 
I figured out its not the driver its the protocol. While LPD and IPP work just fine. Selecting JetDirect will not add a Printer even though it says so.


-- typed wrong ip adress. gutenprint drivers solved the problem
 
Last edited:
Appreciate the help.

Neither LPD or IPP worked using a network address.

Wonder if it is the Konica Minolta driver (which appeared in the database but perhaps was pulled up since it was manually installed in Snow Leopard) is the problem since it is not compatible with Lion?

Any suggestions?
 
Did you try the Gutenprint drivers ? They came with 10.6. Just installed them manually, selected my Printer and it works again !
 
Madd the Sane said:
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

PostScript, I heard, is expensive to license.
As for the OP, you could try Gutenprint. It might not work with JetDirect, though.
Click to expand...
You heard? Yes, there is a license fee for genuine PostScript. However, PostScript clones work almost as well and cost substantially less. Your response, however, is the answer to Jerome Morrow's post. The standard print driver is a solved problem. However, the solution comes at a price. In an era when printers cost less than their replacement ink cartridges, few buyers are willing the pay the price.
 
Solution for Printers that stop working

I had a problem with a Canon 5780 multifunction printer (an office based copier/printer etc). I deleted the printer and re-installed and now all works as normal. I have two other printers to try later this evening and will report back on the success or otherwise of this approach with them.
 
That absolutely worked!

I can't thank you enough for that link and solve.
 
If you are talking about the Konica Minolta printer,
then yes, the drivers are working perfectly under
Lion 10.7.1. In fact, could not get the printer to work
under the OS until I installed the driver attached to
the link above.
 
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