Sharing a USB printer from Mac OS X to Windows
February 5, 2007
Not too long ago I was asked to use hook up the Mac Mini that was collecting dust in our office to our HP Deskjet printer (HP Deskjet 1280 to be exact) and have it function as a “print server” of sorts (we have since replaced it with a NAS with print server functionality, which subsequently broke - that’s how long this post has been sitting in my drafts folder). While setting it up to be shared with Mac machines was a cinch (we have a grand total of 3 Mac machines in the office, including the Mac Mini and my treasured MacBook Pro), sharing the printer from the Mac (Mini) to Windows machines was significantly more difficult. After some trial and error, first with what made the most sense, and then with stuff I could glean off the Internet, I finally arrived at something that works. Maybe this would be useful for the next unfortunate bloke that needs to do this sharing of printers from Mac to Windows machines without a print server.
First point of reference: Print from Windows XP to a shared Mac printer tip on Mac OS X Hints. The tip suggests you select a PostScript driver in Windows after finding it on the network (which requires you to do several things first, but we will come to that later). This worked, but it was sub-optimal because you couldn’t use the printer driver software to do stuff like 2-up printing (i.e. print 2 pages per side per sheet). This post will show you how to share a USB printer from Mac OS X to Windows PCs with full driver capability.
- On the Mac (the one that the USB printer that you want to share is connected to), go to the Sharing preferences pane and ensure Printer Sharing and Windows Sharing are both turned on.
- Fire up your browser and go to http://127.0.0.1:631 - this is the web interface to CUPS. When asked to enter a password, login with your Mac OS X user account (it has to be an administrator account).
- Go to the Printers tab and add a new printer (yes, in addition to any existing printer configuration that already exist for the same printer). Choose a name that’s short and descriptive (no spaces). For the purposes of this guide, let’s call it ‘uberprinter’. Best to keep it under 12 characters since Windows is finicky.
- When asked to select a device, select USB printer.
- You’ll be asked for a Device URI. To find out, open up a terminal and type
lpinfo -v. You should see your USB printer coming up. Mine came up as ‘direct usb://HP/Deskjet%201280?serial=CN516851RPUN’. Copy and paste this (without the ‘direct’ part - i.e., I’d have copied ‘usb://HP/Deskjet%201280?serial=CN516851RPUN’) into the ‘Device URI’ field. - Select a ‘Make’ of ‘Raw‘. Keep going until the printer is added.
- You’re done configuring from the Mac. But before you go, determine your Mac’s IP address (do a ‘ifconfig’ in a shell or fire up System Profiler and check out the ‘Network’ item) - note it down somewhere. Now it’s time to hook up your Windows machine to use the shared printer.
- OK now go to your Windows machine and add a new printer (Control Panel -> Printers and Faxes). Select ‘A network printer… blah blah’. Don’t browse for the printer, you will enter its IP address directly in the ‘URL’ field. Enter ‘http://your.macs.ip.address:631/printers/uberprinter’ (replacing ‘your.macs.ip.address’ with your Mac’s IP address and ‘uberprinter’ with the short name you gave your printer). If you can’t remember your printer’s name, just scurry back to the Mac and browse to http://127.0.0.1:631/printers/. You should be able to see the printer you added listed there - its name is linked there.
- Now, all that’s left is to install the correct Windows printer driver on the Windows machine. If you’re lucky Windows already has your driver, if not do whatever you need to get the proper driver - after all, the purpose of jumping through all these hoops is to get full printer driver functionality off the shared Mac printer.
That’s it. That’ll teach you for not getting a print server or one of those new printers with network functionality.
Problems?
Some readers wrote in with their own difficulties and have kindly allowed me to share their solutions. First off, Patrick McKrell who had a solution for cases where you still are just not able to print from the Windows machine (it involves killing a daemon so it’s pretty sweet).
Thank you for making available your instructions for sharing a USB printer connected to a Mac using OS X with a Windows PC. All of your points worked flawlessly on the Mac. My Mac is a B&W G3 running OS X 10.2.8. The printer is an HP PSC 1510.
…
Back to Windows Add Printer. Is my driver there? No. I browsed the Windows file system to Program Files/HP/. No luck. Couldn’t find or add my driver. Next I unplugged the printer’s USB cable from the Mac and into the PC. Windows detected the new hardware, created whatever files it needed, and automatically created the USB-connected PSC 1500 series printer in Printers and Faxes. Well, that’s pretty darn close. I opened the printer’s properties, changed the port from USB to Internet Port (as per your configuration guidance), sent a print job….and nothing. Hmmm.
Finally, I recalled seeing someone’s web post –thanks to your point of reference. I followed the poster’s instructions, and, yeah, it prints, and in color. Thanks again, Chu, for your post. It was easy to follow, and importantly, it worked with my setup (despite the color issue).
Patrick McKrell
The solution? Change your CUPS configuration to allow raw printing:
Basically, I saw that every job on the windows side had “error”.
After looking at the error logs for cups on the mac box (/var/log/cups/), I noticed this line repeatedly:
print_job: Unsupported format ‘application/octet-stream’!
Did some googling, and found a post with the answer:
>
> You probably need to uncomment the following lines in
> /etc/cups/mime.types and /etc/cups/mime.convs:
>
>
> /etc/cups/mime.types:
> #application/octet-stream
>
>
> /etc/cups/mime.convs:
> #application/octet-stream application/vnd.cups-raw 0
> -
>
>
> That will allow raw printing.Then, kill -HUP the cups daemon, and you’re good to go.
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That’s a cool method - I’d previously tried using the native drivers on Windows for my Mac-connected printer and having it not work.
The method I used was actually different - install Rendez-Vous for Windows on the Windows machine and then use its printer wizard, selecting a PostScript driver. It works, but you don’t get all the snazzy features of this method.
But then again, the PostScript driver supports printing 2 pages on one sheet (reducing the pages 50%) and the normal Windows driver does not, so it’s much of muchness really.
Posted by: Neil T. on February 7, 2007 5am