26 November 2014

Making CUPS printer drivers work again on OS X Yosemite (OS X 10.10)

I recently found out that some printer drives using the CUPS printing system stopped working on OSX 10.10 (Yosemite) that worked fine with the previous OSX Mavericks (10.9).

After some googling around I found various suggestions, but none seemed to help. In the end, it turned out that I had to follow THREE different suggestions to make it work. To save you the same odysee, here's my recipe for making printer drivers work again that stopped working on Yosemite:
  1. Remove any troublesome printers from the "Printers & Scanners" System Preferences.
  2. Re-Install the printer driver.
  3. Fix the permissions of the installed cups drivers by starting the "Disk Utility" program, selecting the startup disk and clicking on "Repair Disk Permissions".
  4. Turn off the tighter Sandboxing checks in Yosemite with these two Terminal commands:
    • sudo sh -c 'echo "Sandboxing Relaxed" >> /etc/cups/cups-files.conf'
    • sudo launchctl stop org.cups.cupsd
  5. Connect the printer and re-add the printer in the "Printers & Scanners" settings.
Hope this helps. If it does, please spread the word. If it doesn't, let me know please.

And, if you found this useful, also check out some other work of mine, such as:

  • Find Any File - The program that finds the files that Spotlight doesn't.
  • iClip - Improves the workflow with text snippets and the clipboard in general.

4 comments:

  1. Thank you so much!

    your instructions just helped me to fix the following problem:
    Network Lexmark X342n didn't print under OS X 10.11 (cups 2.1). It printed one ASCII character line per page instead of the actual documents. Yet it worked great under OS X 10.9 (cups 1.6).

    Finally I found this instruction, so now it works under the 10.11 too.

    Thanks again!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I was able to fix the issue by making the CUPS printing system to work on O.S 10.10 through this blog. It was really informative.

    ReplyDelete
  3. This isn't just the case for old printers, however. It's additionally hard to discover printer drivers and printer programming for old Windows or Mac working frameworks. Epson L565 Driver Printer Download

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thanks from the bottom of my heart. My 2002 ( 17 years old ) Japanese Canon A3 format Laser "LBP-1610" is working perfectly in Mojave 10.14.6

    ReplyDelete