Darren Watt

Had a few problems getting a networked printer from a Windows share working in Leopard - and googling to find the solution showed that I wasn’t the only one, so here’s a quick tut on how I got it going in the end…

Forget trying to add the printer in the System Prefs - looks like there’s still currently a bug in 10.5.x which stops this working correctly, so instead you can add it via CUPS. This works directly on the underlying unix layer rather than the lovely Apple-ness but it works rather than looking pretty. To access it type in http://localhost:631 to your browser.

This should bring up the CUPS main menu.

Select “Add Printer” from the menu.

Type in a name to identify the printer on your Mac. The other fields are optional. Then ‘continue’.

Under Device, select ‘Windows Printer via SAMBA’, then ‘continue’.

Enter the path for the shared printer, eg.

smb://ipaddress-of-windows-pc/shared-printer-name

Lots of people are reporting having problems using hostname rather than IP address, so as long as your host has a fixed IP address this won’t be a problem. Just put the IP address in.

Select the correct manufacturer of the printer you’re setting up, then ‘continue’.

Select the correct model of the printer you’re setting up, then ‘continue’.

Enter the account for accessing the remote shared printer - I had problems unless an admin account for the Windows PC sharing the printer was used.

That should do the job. Trying to print a test page from CUPS still failed but printing from Mac OS works with no problems now. Also the printer should appear in your System Preferences / Printers settings. Good luck, took me ages to get it going.

Just got Leopard installed on the MacBook. Everything seems generally ok, bit zippier (expected that with clean install), apart from it has a bug connecting to Windows Shares on the network. It connects to the server ok, but you can’t browse the contents - after a bit of googling, found lots of other people having this problem too, and the way to solve it is to connect to the shares by IP address rather than hostname, ie. Ctrl-K in Finder, then add smb://192.168.*.*/ with the correct IP address.

Features I’ve noticed so far..

• 3D Dock - Wow! No, makes no difference.
• Stacks - quite cool looking, but I don’t see it as particularly useful.
• Spaces - a good copy of a feature that unix has done since the dawn of time. Whenever I’ve tried to use multscreen stuff I forget about the other screens so it’s wasted on me. I’ll give it another try though.
• Photobooth - They’ve jazzed it up a bit so you can have animated or still ‘greenscreen’ type backdrops, which is fun for a few seconds. Will sell Mac’s in showrooms as before.
• iChat -Now supports Google Talk. About time. Need to have more of a play to see if it will replace Adium.
• Time Machine - They added System Restore. That’s it really, not really played with it but it looks like it will only back up to a volume rather than a network share. Can probably set up a virtual volume on the share and mount that, so will look into that later.

So that’s mainly it. Looks a bit prettier, and the apps I use all seem to work the same. Frontrow’s been updated to look like Apple TV, but I never use it because of the mediacentre, however it was quite handy when I was travelling.

Still no way of stopping iTunes determine gapless playback everytime you start it, only way to stop this seems to be letting it finish it’s business.