I doubt I'll ever buy an HP printer ever again. When 10.5 came out they dropped support for my 1 year old multifunction printer. I have a G4 iBook that we use for casual web browsing anywhere in the house and pulling video off the TiVO, it did not get upgraded to 10.5 and if we want to print anything other than the most basic single sided text-only documents we put it on the iBook and print from there.

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There have been multiple hints of this sort on this site: make your printer work by using a different driver. How hard would it be for manufacturers to just make that the driver for the printer too. Or better yet, develop an open standard for printer drivers so that there is no need for 1000 different drivers for 1000 different printer.

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My understanding is that the SL printer drivers need to support 64-bit mode. The older drivers will work as long as no 64-bit app tries to print using them.

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Why don't HP - or Apple, or others - simply port their excellent HPLIP Linux printing suite to Mac OS X? There would be instant and almost full compatibility with many "old" printers and multifunction devices!

For example, I also have an OfficeJet G85 (connected through USB: and this is probably the source of the problem), which works perfectly in Windows and Linux (with HPLIP), but has never worked in Mac OS X 10.5.x and 10.6.x (no official HP drivers anymore): the Gutenprint and/or HPIJS drivers theoretically should work for printing, but in practice there is no output from the printer (or the queue hangs forever waiting for the device); known problems, but with no solution sofar.

Would it be so difficult and time-consuming to port the complete HPLIP suite to Mac OS X (IIRC, there had even been some attempts to do this some years ago, also on the MacPorts front)...?

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Well The Linux drivers have been ported to a Mac. Just use the web page:

http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/openprinting/macosx/hpijs#HPIJS_for_Mac_OS_X

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Yes, of course I know that; but HPIJS is only a subset of HPLIP: for example, with HPIJS you only get basic printing (if it works) with multifuntion devices, while with HPLIP (sofar only on Linux) you get full or almost full functionality (similarly to the proprietary HP Mac OS X drivers and software).

If HPLIP were available for Mac OS X, old multifunction devices - such as the OfficeJet G85 and others - could be used not only for printing, but also for scanning and even faxing on some models.

Maybe it is also the USB implementation on Mac OS X that has delayed such a full port of HPLIP - who knows...?

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Could you let me know how you did this.
I have an HP 932 printer. It is strong like bull, and I don't want to replace it.
When I try and change the driver to the 9800 my Imac still thinks it is using the 932.
Plugging the 932 printer into the USB tells my Imac to use the 932 printer driver.
Do you need a 9800 laying around to fool the computer?



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Go to the following Apple web site and download all drivers for OS 10.6:

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/apple/macosx_updates/macosxv1061update.html

After you install them, go to System Prefs and select the Print & Fax pane. Click on your printer then click Options & Supplies. Select Driver. Then under the pull down menu "print using" select printing software and find the 9800 printer driver. Also, check the box for duplex printing. I believe that is how you would do it. You could also load on the drivers from the installation disk, but they would not likely be as complete as the current driver file you download. Hope this helps/works!

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