Billoblog ®

My wife managed to wean herself from Microsoft a couple years ago.  Not quite ready to jump to Linux, she decided on a Mac, and has generally been pretty happy with Mac OS X.  I’ve been pretty happy with it since even though it’s not Linux, it’s BSD under the hood, and I can fix many of the problems she has.

But then she “upgraded” to Leopard.  Man, was that a mistake.  The first thing that has happened is that her MacBook can’t maintain wireless connection.  She can get on our local home network, but AirPort drops signal every few minutes, has to rescan, and after a few minutes will pick up again.  This makes web browsing almost impossible.  I’ve tried all the tricks I could find on the net, but it just can’t keep stable.  Apple really screwed up Airport with Leopard, at least in terms of compatibility.  I hope the new Snow Leopard fixes this, because I haven’t figured out how to do it myself.

There’s another problem, though — her machine can no longer recognize the wireless HP PhotoSmart C8180 printer — which worked fine before the upgrade.  The *original* way I added the printer was by going to System Preferences -> Print&Fax -> +  to add a printer, choose “JP Jetdirect” as protocol, add the ip address, choose the driver from the list, and there you go.  Unfortunately, this time, the printer is not found, and the driver defaults to “Generic Postscript.”  When I try to add the printer manually, I get an no connect error with the error message “client-error-not-authorized error.”

I’ve tried every permutation on the books.  Finally I decided to bypass the OS as much as possible and use CUPS (the underlying printer setup system) directly.  To access that, go to http://127.0.0.1:631.  That brings up the CUPS administration page for the local box.  Choose “Add printer” and follow the directions.  The only trick is that for the URL, you need to actually specify the socket, i.e. instead of “http://whatever” you type “socket://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:9100″ where xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is the ip address of the printer.  This added the printer fine, and it showed up in the list when I went back to system prefs.  Go figure.

Good luck, and I hope Snow Leopard fixes this.

UPDATE:  A friend of mine told me that there was a more simple solution.  Apparently if you **log in** as the administrator and add the printer (as opposed to just putting in the admin name and passwd when the requestor comes up when you try while logged in as a regular user) it will work.  I tried it on my wife’s mac.  I can add the printer, but it doesn’t find it automatically, so I still have to enter everything by hand.  Go figure.  But it might be easier to try this before going directly to CUPS.