The love affair is over

[nmg]

Let me get this straight. I can't print from MacOS 10.4 to a commonplace HP non-postscript printer (in this case a LaserJet 1022) that's connected to and shared from a Windows XP box without downloading, compiling and installing a bunch of open source software from a third party.

I was under the impression that Apple computers were renowned for their ease of use.

Comments

[hatter.livejournal.com]

I'd partly blame windows - surely the world would be a nicer place is windows just announced "here's a printer I have, send me postscript files" or even a special universal MS printing format for file, rather than requiring clients to know about printers attached to the print server. After all, if you were printing from a linux box to OS X (or a Windows with Services for Unix box) then you'd just send such a job to the lpd, it's the windows factor that is weird. And you, for expecting a cheapass printer to not complicate life.


the hatter


the hatter

[nmg.livejournal.com]

I can merrily print to the LJ1022 if it's connected directly to the Mac. I can merrily print to other Windows shared printers, including non-postscript printers. This particular combination seems problematic.

[jorune.livejournal.com]

I'm not convinced by Mac's, I tried a iMac and didn't feel that impressed.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

The machine itself (a MacBook Pro) is great. It runs UNIX, but it has a decent UI and runs the applications I need (Illustrator, for example).

However, this sort of fiddling around with random pieces of software to fix things that by all rights should work is the reason that I finally stopped using Linux and started using Windows XP. I spent much of my PhD faffing around trying to get my Linux box working, and I don't have that sort of time now; I have to treat computers as a means to an end, and not as an end in themselves.

[jorune.livejournal.com]

I wholly agree. My parents have macs and they prefer them to pc's but given specialist interests, i.e. trading software, games and the like the mac can be a real pain to work with.

I would happily consider buying apple hardware and then running parallels or xp.

[(Anonymous)]

Plug the USB into an Apple Airport Express and it will work without a hitch.

Apples are renowned for working flawlessly with other Apple kit.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_nicolai_/]

Proprietary lockin will always defeat ease of use.

[earth-magic.livejournal.com]

I had the same problem with an old HP printer and OSX when it first came out. I ended up eventually getting a very cheap new printer because I just got fed up with the whole thing. A very annoying solution to the problem.

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

Every really rubbish Mac experience I've ever had has been in some way related to Windows networking. If I could just make it a Mac only network, all would be much better.

Printers have been sufficiently bad that we keep two printers around. That's not entirely unfortunate -- we have a printer-more-suited-to-photos on one machine and a printer-more-suited-to-text on the other. But still, if printing across the network was straightforward we might only have one printer now.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

There are a number of issues at play here. The 1022 is a cheap non-postscript printer; for those printers, OS X uses gimp-print to provide CUPS drivers for non-ps printers, but gimp-print doesn't support the 1022. Gah.

[gothick-matt.livejournal.com]

Well, Apple have tried to make the other way around easy (if you use Bonjour, say, you can connect anything that works with the Mac on the Mac end and easily find/connect to it using a Postscript driver from any Windows machine, even if it's not a Postscript printer, I believe. I certainly had that working with an HP 1100A.) But from Mac to Windows isn't as nice, from what I've found. I'm thinking you may be being a bit harsh on the Mac, though; it sounds like it's Windows that's getting in the way... If the 1022 had a network adapter, would it work from both machines?

[perdita-fysh.livejournal.com]

Since adding Macs to the network, our HP officejet 7140xi has become confused about which tray to print from and my suspicion is that the Mac drivers are to blame. It is particularly annoying because until this point I have been able to leave invoices in the upper tray and plain paper in the lower and all of our computers respected that, but now all bets are off as the windows machines and the Macs can randomly decide to use the upper tray for no good reason and I've wasted tons of invoices *&(

Nothing is perfect, it's just mostly better.

[ronaldraygun.livejournal.com]

I ditched my HP in favour of a Brother 2040, best decision I ever made. I, too, had been struggling with open source drivers and Windows-Mac networking problems. Stupid winprinters!

If you're wondering who I am, I was doing an interests search on "Farmers markets".