Comments on: Printing to windows shared printers from Mac OS X

By: Pete Carnell

Pete Carnell — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 07:34:59 +0000

Just found a gotcha that you can fall into. I called my printer name that I made on the Mac

t1100-hostname

Every time I tried to print to it with

lpr -Pt1100-hostname test.ps

I got the following error -

lpr: error - unable to print file: client-error-not-found

Basically this means that the cups cannot find the printer. What happens is cups converts the hyphen characters ‘-’ to underscores ‘_’ - So the printer device is called t1100_hostname but the Printer utility still has the nice name you gave it.
So I needed to use

lpr -Pt1100_hostname test.ps

You can check the name that is being broadcast using

lpstat -t

Search through the list and look to see if your printer is listed and check the name. Or just make sure that you use underscores or a short name

By: Printing from OSX to HP Laserjet 6L. FINALLY. « [m i a o w] the cat

Printing from OSX to HP Laserjet 6L. FINALLY. « [m i a o w] the cat — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 13:40:34 +0000

[...] 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. [...]

By: Alfonsmr

Alfonsmr — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 17:43:06 +0000

Thanks, it was very helpfull to me.

By: Becky

Becky — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 21:25:43 +0000

I am runnning OS X 10.3.9 and the Option key suggestion doesn’t work. Is there anything else you can suggest?

By: Peter Skarpetis

Peter Skarpetis — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 00:57:33 +0000

You are quite right, this entry was written a long time ago for Mac OS X 10.3.2. For Mac OS X 10.4.X what you suggest is indeed correct. I have updated the blog post to reflect this. Thanks for pointing it out

By: unixwiz » Blog Archive » Mac Printing to Windows

unixwiz » Blog Archive » Mac Printing to Windows — Sun, 16 Jul 2006 04:46:08 +0000

[...] printing to windows shared printers from samba - Tried doing this one as well. It uses SAMBA, but I kept getting the NT_XXXX errors, so I gave up on this one. [...]