I am trying to accomplish One thing and either way I will be happy.
I had a HP Laserjet with No Mac OS support and every third party drive didn't work at all. So I sold the windows only LJ and just bought a Mac OS X compatible HP LJ.
This is what you're dealing with. Latest macbook pro released purchased 10/2007. Entry level 2.2ghz/7600GT 128mb/160gb upgrade hd/and 4GB ram upgrade (not from apple) Running tiger. Have leopard but want tiger to work first with this.
OK that said. I run a wired and wireless lan with over 5 machines. All are windows based 98se, W2k, Server 2003, XP Pro, and a combo of Tiger and Vista via Parallels.
I also aquired a brand new Apple gigabit basestation extreme supporting ABGN and one USB jack for printer or drive sharing.
A smart person would want the printer with the most traffic to reside on a print server outside a PC. So I would say this would be my first choice if both methods work.
But I plug in the new HP which by the way is model P1006 (Crazy newegg.com sale for $59.99 and no rebate. MSRP $179 included free shipping) My HP 1018/1020 is being sold for a hair under that the new one costs.
The airport extreme sees the USB printer though using Bonjour for windows, no such luck with any connectivity and this also occured before I got the LJ P1006. I used the HP 1020 which only had windows drivers, and bonjour for XP would not let me print to it despite no errors on the print wizard.
So ultimately I would like the print on the mac basestation sharing the HP with my Windows PC's and Expecially my Macbook Pro.
I have one small issue I can't seem to figure out (man I can figure anything out on a PC, but not on a mac just yet) - This base station looks like by design you are stuck with 3 ip ranges and are stuck with .1 as your default suffix no matter what. I would like to run it in my subnet of 192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0 but I have a wireless lan on the other side of the house that is bridged in and has a fixed IP of 192.168.1.1. So I cannot get the base station to give me something other than .1. Every works under 10.0.1.1 and once it configured itself for 10.0.1.49 and I didn't do anything different. But these tests were done with the wireless bridge unhooked and the base station configured as 192.168.1.1.
For the record, bonjour sees it on Windows machines but though it installs without an error, it doesn't work.
Now let's head to the mac side. NADA. End of story.
So option #2 is still feasible because I run Windows Server 2003 24/7 and it never crashes and has UPS protection. I have shared the printer with no auth needed and full control to user group "everyone" not concerned with printer security.
Now without a mac involved in the foreground. My windows machines can connect and print fast and perfect while connecting through W2K3 to the LJ P1006. But Mac OS X says nada. Always default to "workgroup" under windows printing. My workgroup name is hitradio but I can't change it. I have repeated the same option many times using the option key while pressing more printers to activate the advanced option for samba based printing. No Luck.
Furthermore, the Laserjet Driver from HP have been installed a couple times and do not show up as an available HP printer??? No errors on the install. Unlike a PC, I don't know if Mac has something like an INF file to do it manually by extracting the contents directory from the HP package installer.
So in a nutshell, there you have it. The mac sees nothing on the base station and windows server. But even if that issue gets conquered, I still need the HP driver and not a gimp based internal mac driver. This low end laserjet printers used a host based printing method so the drivers are specific to the printer. They cover both the P1000 and P1500 series.
Anyone have an idea why the installed HP laserjet drive package downloaded straight from HP with Safari is not propagating to the mac devices database?
I help moderate over at a more PC based tech support forum but seems no mac literate experts are out there including myself, but I'm working on it.
Thanks for your time everyone.
Scott