29 August 2010

Printer Sharing in Mac OS X

I discovered that this is yet another thing that's very easy to do in OS X.

At home, we use the HP Deskjet F4280 All-in-One Printer; it's a printer, scanner, and photocopier. Though not the best printer and doesn't give the cheapest printing per page cost, it's decent enough to get us through.

I've already set it up with the MSI Wind hackintosh; I use the HP Printer Drivers v.2.4.1 for Mac instead of installing the software suite from the CD that came with our printer. Now we scan using Preview app's import from scanner feature and I'd say it gives a more OS X integrated experience this way. I never really liked the bundle of HP apps; they were not very easy to use specially when scanning.
HP Scan Pro, besides the fact that it won't let me scan in Snow Leopard now (it reports an error), would save the original scanned imaged in new folder it created somewhere in my user directory. With Preview, it automatically saves the image in Pictures. This simple gesture of keeping my files neat and tidy is something I really appreciate.

And so now let's get to the juicier part:

How To Setup Printer Sharing Between Two Macs/Hackintoshes
- Make sure both computers are connected to the local network

  1. On my main hackintosh, in my case it's the MSI Wind that the printer is physically connected to, I go to System Preferences > Sharing and enable the option "Printer Sharing":                   
  2. On my other hackintosh, the HP Mini 311, I go to System Preferences > Sharing and enable the same option "Printer Sharing".
  3. Still at the same window, at the right portion of the Sharing preference pane, under the pair of boxes "Printers" and "Users", I click on the plus (+) sign.
  4. This will bring me to the Add Printer pane which automatically retrieves the printer name and settings:                                                       
  5. After clicking on the "Add" button, the printer is set up for my HP Mini 311: 
And I'm done!

Now when I want to print a document from my room on the HP Mini 311, as long as the wifi router is on and the MSI Wind and the printer is on, I can do so just as if the printer was physically connected to my Mini 311.

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