Oh. My. God. A major breakthrough today. For months I have struggled with trying to get my old and excellent HP Laserjet 6L printer to print from my MacBook. Was desperate enough to hook it up to the Windows computer and then try and print by sharing the printer from there. It has been the stuff of teeth grinding infuriation. I was reduced to ‘printing’ stuff to a pdf file on the mac, transferring it to the pc and then printing from there. But no more!!

It’s a wonderful thing that happens when you stumble on a few minor bits of extra information which can revolutionise your previously uninspired googling. My first win was finding out that when you go into the printer setup utility and then click on ‘more printers’ while holding down the option key (of course, how else would you do it?) you get an advanced menu option. Naturally. Anyway, to give credit where it’s due, I got that vital bit of information from here.

But I still couldn’t print. And then, while searching for instructions that included that little trick with the option key, I found a post entitled Printing to windows shared printers from Mac OS X. I was a bit worried that I didn’t have a password to enter for my pc, but just left it out and it didn’t seem to matter. I almost fell on the floor when the printer shuffled into life.

Of course, that had been my modest aim, but as soon as it worked, I had to take the further step and try and see if I could plug the usb cable from the printer directly into my mac, and print that way. I’d read, in my google rambles, all about how it matters what kind/brand of printer usb cable you have – particularly as old laser printers are pre-usb. Complete crap. Mine is just some old usb printer cable that I’ve had for at least seven years. A lot of other posts went on about the need for a print server thingy. Wrong.

I went through all this on my first MacBook and never solved the problem. But one thing I did do when I got this new one was delete all the preinstalled printer drivers (saving myself 2gig) and installed the Gutenprint drivers. I kept looking and on some forum in deepest, darkest somewhere I found a link to a truly simplistic page entitled Tutorial how to connect a Parallel-Printer to Mac via USB – I was made very hopeful by the fact that the person who put the tutorial together also had the Laserjet 6L. There was hope after all!

I didn’t end up being able to print as a result of that page (due to not knowing what the hell a usb device url was supposed to be), but it prompted me to keep looking and I stumbled on an even more encouraging post [Macosx-list] Re: SUCCESS!! Mac 10.2/Belkin Parallel to USB/LaserWriter Select 360 and the key piece of information contained on that page was as follows:

I attempted to manually select the LWS 360 driver by holding down the option key while clicking add and using the “advanced” settings. I chose “unkown” for the device, rather than “AppleTalk Printer Acess Protocol”, which was the default. This was the only choice that resulted in the “device URL” being automatically completed. I then chose “Apple” for printer model and then it let me select the LWS 360 from a sublist. After adding the printer, I selected “show information” from the “printers” menu and changed the name to something more head compatible. I also changed the “installable options” to recognize the sheet feeder. AND IT WORKED FLAWLESSLY!!

And mine worked flawlessly too. It didn’t seem to matter that they were installing a different printer, it was just HOW they did it. Incidentally, I used the driver “HP Laserjet 5 CUPS+Gutenprint 5″. So it can be done! I hope this saves some other poor person out there who doesn’t want to give up on their old laser printer just because their new mac makes it all unnecessarily hard.