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.

04 November 2014

Find Empty Folders - a free OS X tool

Today someone asked me if I knew a way to find and delete empty folders, even if they contain an invisible .DS_Store file.

I googled and found nothing.

So I quickly whipped something out with Real Studio.

The result can be found here:

http://www.tempel.org/FindEmptyFolders