Printing from Windows to a printer shared printer on a Mac

Last week I’ve set up my new home server based on a Mac Mini and obviously Mac OS X (Mavericks). What can I say? Like I expected, everything went like a breeze…

Well, until I configured my wife’s PC laptop with Windows 7. I have shared the printer to all my Macs with no problem, but the PC only printed blank pages. After some googling I found, that the problem seems to be, that I’m using duplicated drivers: I configured my Mac with a printer driver AND I configured my PC with a driver, so the document data got translated two times, which obviously is not a good thing.

However, I didn’t want to use a generic driver on the PC, because I would loose all the goodness of the printer (like printing double sided). So, I’ve created a new printer (only for the PC) using the ra– hey! Where’s the raw printer driver in the print UI? Nowhere to be found!

But well, you know, Mac OS X is basically a BSD with a nice UI. The thing, that drives the Mac’s printer sharing is an old friend of mine – cups. So, on to http://macmini:631– Shoot. No Web UI.

Okay, cups already tells me, how to achieve that. Get a terminal on the mac, become root (using sudo -s) and type:

cupsctl WebInterface=yes

Hey! A Web UI. Go to the printer, select „Modify printe– ARGH! „Forbidden“. Well, Apple, guess you don’t want arbitrary users to fiddle with cups directly, eh? Back to the terminal it is! Now, open up

/etc/cups/cupsd.conf

and find the section that reads „„. Add a „Allow from all“ after „Order allow, deny“ and finally restart cups:

launchctl stop org.cups.cupsd
launchctl start org.cups.cupsd

Now, you can modify the printer, skip to the page where the driver is selected and select the „Raw Queue“. After that, you’re good to go printing using the PC driver to the printer shared on your mac.