I’ve written previously about my HP-5MP printer. One of the things I love about it is that I’ve been able to get it to work with every computer I’ve ever had in my house – PC, Mac, Linux, you name it. Not only that, but for probably the last 8 years, I’ve been able to share it with all those computers by having it plugged into an SMC Barricade 7004WBR router/wi-fi gateway/print server.

Getting this setup to work with the MacBook I’m using (MacOSX 10.5.3) was a bit of a sticky wicket however, but I managed to get things going. For the sake of posterity, and the one and half other people out there who might care, here’s how to go about it. The trick is to use the native CUPS web interface instead of the Mac’s Print and Fax preferences, as follows …

• On your Mac, go to http://127.0.0.1:631 to get to the CUPS interface
• Click “Add Printer”
• Choose “LPD/LPR Host or Printer”
• For the Device URI, use “lpd://hostname/printer_queue_name“. Where hostname is the IP of your router/firewall/print server and printer_queue_name is the name of your print queue. In my case these were 192.168.1.1 and “lp”, respectively, for a URI of “lpd://192.168.1.1/lp”
• In the next couple pages, choose the make and model of your printer. (This is where the CUPS UI really shines – there are TONS of printers supported. I suspect that explicitely specifying the correct info here instead of using the generic Postscript driver is what finally got my printer working.)
• Tweak the options for your printer if needed (I left mine alone)
• “Add Printer” to save the new printer configuration.
• Go back to the CUPS home page and click “Manage Printers”. From there you can print a test page to make sure everything is working correctly.