I have an Epson CX3500 multifunction printer/scannner/copier thing. Its spends most of it’s time with one ink tank requiring replacement. I should get rid of it, but it allows me to make excuses to go to my local Dick Smith Electronics store.

Anyway, I have this USB CX3500 connected to my Debian Etch box and set up as a local cups printer. I have two queues for it; cx3500raw and “Stylus-CX3500—CUPS+Gutenprint-v5.0.0” (I should change that).  The cx3500raw is naturally a raw queue and the other one isn’t. The raw one is so a windows computer on the home network can print to it with the Windows CX3500 driver installed locally on the windows computer.

So with my Mac Mini I wanted to print to the thing as well. OS X 10.4.x has CUPS as its native printing solution (I think) so I thought this should be easy.  It’s been rather painful. First I thought it’d have to be set up similar to how the Windows machine works; ie. you specify the queue as the remote raw queue, but the driver is local.  The printer adder in OS X doesn’t seem to let you add raw queues, so I had to follow the instructions here. That worked so long as I created a printer in the GUI that was the non-raw printer queue.

So here’s what I did:

– use the gui to add a printer ; Protocol is IPP, Address is just the IP address of the remote CUPS server (don’t put :631 on the end of the address) and my queue was /printers/Stylus-CX3500—CUPS+Gutenprint-v5.0.0 . Name is whatever you like. And print using Generic Postscript.

– Now  change the queue to raw as per those instructions.

That should do it. I guess what happens is that OS X just prints in postscript and we leave it up to the CUPS driver on the remote server to convert from postscript to the native printer format.