Bah, XP won’t talk to my Mac
After my upgrade from 10.3 (Panther) to 10.4 (Tiger), I lost my ability to print to my Windows XP shared HP 2410xi. One problem was that the old gimp-print 4.x series printer drivers appeared to be missing an application or shared library; when I attempted to print, I’d get an error telling me that there was some problem starting ‘rastertoprinter’ with error 2 (ENOENT to us UNIX folk). I found gimp-print had updated to a new version (as well as new name, gutenprint), so I updated, and that got rid of the ‘rastertoprinter’ problem, but now I had a new one. It seems that my XP box no longer accepted the login from my Mac to talk to the printer. I tried a number of things including:
- reset my printer configuration (which blows away ALL your printer set up, by the way… be sure you want to do this).
- removed all my smb keys from the Key Chain Manager
- re-added the printer, including finding it in the Print Browser -> More Printers ->Windows Printing, selected Network Neighborhood, then browsed through the default XP workgroup of Mshome, my computer and finally found my printer, just as I’d suspect. I selected it, and appropriate gutenprint driver, and saved.
- rinse, repeat.
After about two hours of smb nonsense, I discovered from another post here that Windows XP actually has an LPD service that isn’t enabled by default. I enabled that, changed my printer to an IP Printer, and wheee… I can print again!
1 comment March 8th, 2007