[kennedy]

Desperately seeking a printer driver guru...

1) Where does OS X record what print driver to use with what printer?

2) Same question, but for shared printers?

3) How does OS X decide what print driver to use for a shared printer in the first place (when it first appears)?

4) If OS X decides to use one print driver for a shared printer, how do you later tell it to use a different print driver?

5) If #4 isn't possible, can I at least make OS X forget its prior choice of print driver so that I can hopefully make it choose again?


Why am I asking these questions?

On my PB 12, I made the mistake of trying to print to a shared printer for which I had not loaded its printer driver on the PB12 (only on the sharing machine -- seemed logical at the time). When you do that, it uses some generic driver, queues the jobs up like it knows what its doing, but then can never figure out how to talk to the IPP host.

Figuring out the err of my ways (getting another computer to work), I went and installed the proper printer drivers on my PB12 and, with those printers hooked directly to my PB's USB ports, was able to print no problem. Returning the printers to their original computer (which is sharing them), I tried to use them. Unfortunately, the stupid PowerBook still remembers the old (wrong) printer driver it chose to use for those shared printers. Same useless behavior. I've tried everything I can think of to get it to reset that and use the proper printer driver.

How do I know its using the wrong printer driver? Because the print dialog is the generic one rather than the one specific to my printer's driver.

Please help... someone has to understand this printer driver $#!+... please... I hope...
Thanks!!


P.S. Yes, I did post a similar query to the OS X forum... but nobody there seems to know... so I am trying here... I've been wrestling with these printer driver mysteries for a week now... going in endless circles ... this is actually worse than the worst DOS interrupt number conflict problem I've ever had... I own Macs so I don't have to deal with this $#!+... sorry, I am ranting... any help will be hugely appreciated!!

[scottiB]

Have you tried adding a new printer in the Print Center with the proper drivers for the shared printer (naming it something different), then deleting the old, generic printer?

That may work.

Printer drivers: computer/Library/Printers

[kennedy]

Originally posted by scottiB:
Have you tried adding a new printer in the Print Center with the proper drivers for the shared printer (naming it something different), then deleting the old, generic printer?

Thanks for the suggestion.

Yes, sorta. I *did* connect up the printer directly to my PBook, Add it via PrintCenter installing the proper drivers. But you can't really "delete" the old printer when the old printer is a shared printer... best you can do is turn off sharing over on the shared computer... which I did. The shared printers were gone... no trace of them in PrintCenter... but when I moved the printers back over to the sharing machine and turned sharing back on... the printers returned and instead of picking up my newly installed drivers, they picked up the drivers they had before.

Printer drivers: computer/Library/Printers

Thanks... but I think those are just the pre-installed printer drivers... so if you add one of those printers, you don't need to install a driver. I don't want to delete those.

What I am looking for is when you actually Add a printer, the computer records that somewhere. Further, it records what driver to use with that printer... that's what I am desperately trying to find.

Thanks again!

[scottiB]

Originally posted by kennedy:
The shared printers were gone... no trace of them in PrintCenter... but when I moved the printers back over to the sharing machine and turned sharing back on... the printers returned and instead of picking up my newly installed drivers, they picked up the drivers they had before.

From the print server/host machine, delete the shared printer, then reinstall it. Then install the proper drivers on the client, ans see if that works.

All my printers are LAN/ip based, so I'm guessing a bit here.

[anoetic]

Go into print center.

Highlight the printer you want to change the driver for.

Under the Printers menu select show info.

A window will pop up. Select Printer Model from the drop down menu.

On the page you should have a drop-down menu that let's you select any printer driver you want for it.

[kennedy]

Originally posted by anoetic:
Go into print center.

Highlight the printer you want to change the driver for.

Under the Printers menu select show info.

A window will pop up. Select Printer Model from the drop down menu.

On the page you should have a drop-down menu that let's you select any printer driver you want for it.

Its grayed out for Shared Printers.
Do you know where this setting goes for normal printers? (I am guessing that's where its being cached for shared printers also.)

Thanks for the suggestion.