Fixing Old Printer Drivers to Work in Snow Leopard

The upgrade to snow leopard may be leaving some of you with not working printers. When I upgraded I could no longer print to my Xerox Workcentre Pro 238. The thing it seems is that snow leopard deletes all of your old PPDs and printer drivers. I had to download and install the driver again. Then alas, after doing so, the printer failed to function, it gave me the error message “The printer software was installed incorrectly. Please reinstall the printer’s software or contact the manufacturer for assistance.”

After researching the error, I came to the conclusion that it has to do with snow leopard upgrading CUPS. The newest version of CUPS, I read, requires that all the drivers’ files be owned by root. After investigating I found that Xerox’s PPD’s and plugins were NOT owned by root and thus causing the problem. To remedy this problem just type this command into the terminal:

sudo chown -R root:admin /Library/Printers

(The command might take a while to run.) This owns the /Library/Printers folder and everything in it to root, this could potentially fix many different printer software to work with snow leopard since it can effect pretty much any printer driver. So if you’re having problems try giving this a shot. Good luck.