Man, I spent about three hours trying to print to from my mac to a windows 7 shared printer. The first thing I learned is that Mac OSX does not like SMB shares or hostnames, so the Windows printer tab on the add printer dialog is pretty much useless. It never did find my shared printer, and I couldn’t even ping the hostname of my other computer. Then, after a good deal of frustration, I found out that the EPSON-provided Mac OSX drivers (on the CD and from the website) do not work. Some places on the Internet said it has something to do with a conflict with a previous installation, or the Apple-provided drivers, but I’m more inclined to think that the EPSON-provided drivers are just buggy. So, I decided to just go with some open-source drivers, and I was happy to see things working in no time! Here are the steps:
- On your Windows computer, make sure you have enabled printer sharing, and have selected a share name that does not have spaces or weird characters
- On your Mac, download Gutenprint for Mac OSX (http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net/MacOSX.php)
- Run the uninstall
- Run the install
- I restarted my computer, but you probably don’t have to
- Go to Settings
- Click Print & Fax
- Click the [+] under the printers and scanners list
- Click the Advanced tab
- From the Type dropdown, select LPD/LPR Host or Printer
- In the URL box, type “lpd://192.168.1.x/sharename” (of course, replacing 192.168.1.x with your windows computer’s local IP, and sharename with the shared name of the printer). Make sure you use an IP address, not a hostname like “labPC1″.
- From the Print Using dropdown, select “Select Printer Software…”
- Choose the Gutenprint version of the driver for your printer model (it should look something like Epson ActionLaser 1100 – CUPS+Gutenprint v5.2.7)