Fixing Old Printer Drivers to Work in Snow Leopard

Posted: September 3rd, 2009 | Author: Remi | Filed under: OS X, Personal | 17 Comments »

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.

17 Comments on “Fixing Old Printer Drivers to Work in Snow Leopard”

  1. 1 Brad said at 7:37 am on October 7th, 2009:

    Your a lifesaver – thank you.

  2. 2 Mark said at 6:19 am on October 21st, 2009:

    GREAT Tip! Thanks! Worked perfectly for allowing me to print to a Ricoh Aficio MP C3300.

  3. 3 Dave said at 12:23 pm on November 5th, 2009:

    Brilliant! Thanks, this worked great.

  4. 4 Bill said at 12:53 pm on November 30th, 2009:

    worked for me! Thanks!

  5. 5 Michel said at 6:46 am on December 3rd, 2009:

    Great! You saved me a lot of headache. Thanks for the tip.

    Best regards from sunny Switzerland.

  6. 6 ryan said at 9:19 am on December 9th, 2009:

    remi,

    you are a sicko!

    thanks for your help…

    much appreciated…

  7. 7 Nacho said at 1:27 am on December 17th, 2009:

    Lifesaver thanks!

  8. 8 Robert said at 6:51 am on March 9th, 2010:

    Absolutely a lifesaver!!! It worked on my Ricoh MP C3300 & 3010 using Snow Leopard, which I had just recently upgraded to from Leopard. Tks a Mil again!

  9. 9 Mark said at 10:22 am on May 26th, 2010:

    genius! you rock.

  10. 10 namit said at 1:49 am on May 27th, 2010:

    I had to delete all drives in the list and start a fresh seamed to work for me.

    Printer: canon clc-ir c3200

  11. 11 Séraphin said at 4:51 am on May 27th, 2010:

    Excellent, this solved my problem with Nashuatec MP 3010

  12. 12 David said at 4:30 pm on June 2nd, 2010:

    You are awesome. I have a Lexmark Z2400 series. It worked through the USB, but it wouldn’t work wireless. I tried your trick and it worked perfectly. Thanks!

  13. 13 Ash Dando said at 11:38 pm on June 11th, 2010:

    You are a legend mate – was having trouble with my Ricoh MP C1500sp after upgrading to Snow Leopard. Works a treat now. Cheers!

  14. 14 patrick said at 2:26 am on June 14th, 2010:

    thank you so much this solves it !!!!!! you are the man !!!

  15. 15 ta630 said at 10:22 am on June 20th, 2010:

    Thanks so much for your help!
    Worked GREAT for my Mac Pro connected to my Brother MFC-7820N via ethernet on my Airport Extreme Base Station!

  16. 16 Moonface said at 6:42 am on June 23rd, 2010:

    Thank you so much!! This was literally driving me crazy. Brilliant.

  17. 17 Grateful said at 6:52 pm on July 20th, 2010:

    This solved the error for me as well. Splash RPX-ii with Xerox DC242.

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