Snow Leopard: Apple Talk R.I.P.

Early adopters invariably get punished! It's a lesson I had learned the hard way several times before. But the "thrill" of being among the early birds to test Apple's new operating system this time around was again stronger than reason. The result, as you expected, was serious trouble in getting certain things to work properly. This time it was my network printers (an old HP Laserwriter 4050 TN and a relatively new Canon PIXMA 5200R) which simply refused to work.

Apple Care Support, although very friendly and supportive, could not get my printers working either. Their advice: "put pressure on the print suppliers to update their drivers".. Apple Care offered to "push" the problem within Apple, although with little hope for a solution within a reasonable time frame. That left "googling" as my last hope.

It didn't take prolonged browsing to obtain confirmation, that I was far from alone with my problem. APPLE had unceremoniously dropped its age old proven network software "Appletalk" without even mentioning it. As a result, network printing no longer functions with a great number of printers, as manufacturers could not keep up with providing modified printer drivers. After reading through several dozens of Apple Forum pages full of irate early adapters with non-functioning network printers I finally found a solution suggested by a HP engineer which worked. To save you time, I shall repeat it here:

Take the following steps to mount a HP network printer: 1) delete the "old" printer icon in the "Printers" window of the "Print & Fax" System Prefences tab of Snow Leopard. 2) select a new printer by pressing the "HP Jet Socket" tab under "Protocol"and enter the printer's IP address into the "Address" tab. 3) The system then automatically searches for and finds the HP Laserwriter printer driver (for which an updated Snow Leopard compatible driver exists on HP's website and I believe also on the Snow Leopard system disc) 4) with the new printer driver selected press "Add" on the "Add Printer" tab in Print & Fax System Prefs and you are good to go. The HP driver only works with this procedure. By inputting e.g. the printer's name and selecting "Internet Printing Protocol" the system finds the appropriate printer driver, but the actual printing gets stuck every time as the printing queue triggers the printer to go "off".

I hope this will be of assistance to other frustrated "early snow leopards".

Unfortunately, this procedure did not work for my other printer mentioned above, since Canon has not yet provided an updated printer driver. Be patient, early adopters ....

Comments

[Puneet Mohan Lal]

I never ever saw such a intresting comments for snow leopard, greatings from the Indian brother friend of your son mike huber!

[Klaus Huber]

Hey Puneet, thanks and my greetings. Hope you had no Appletalk dependent printers in your environment. For a more complete overview of what works and what doesn't under SL check http://snowleopard.wikidot.com/.

[Gil Sicuro]

That's Apple. They drop technologies without any compromise with their useres, so when they release new software or new macs your invaluable investment is toast from night to day. That happened before with serial/USB, NuBus/PCI, PCI/PCI-X, PCI-X/PCI-e, PPC/Intel.

[oakley outlet]

~*~ It occurred to me that reading came so naturally to me that to actually break sentences and thoughts down into “parts of speech” seemed not only unnecessary, but ruined the poetry of the words.