Categories
Mac OS X Server

Share USB Printer from OS X Server

— OS X Server print services don’t support non-PostScript USB printers. Does
— anyone know a workaround or third party solution?

Yeap. I use this one successfully : transform temporarily your Mac OS X Server… as a Mac OS X box 🙂

Just type in Terminal :
From Guillaume Gete on the server admin list

sudo mv /System/Library/CoreServices/ServerVersion.plist /System/Library/CoreServices/oldServerVersion.plist

Then log out and login to your server (you will see that it displays the Mac OS X login window ).

Now, just go to the Printer System preference and activate USB printer sharing.

Now, go back to Terminal and type :

sudo mv /System/Library/CoreServices/oldServerVersion.plist /System/Library/CoreServices/ServerVersion.plist

And logout and login again.

There you are, your USB printer is shared. However, you may not be able to use all the nifty functions of the server’s Print service.

7 replies on “Share USB Printer from OS X Server”

I found this artical and tried it but it did not work. I could never get my Mac to log back in as a Mac X only box. Worst, after restarting the Mac, (eMac with OS X Server 10.3.9), the desktop is just a blank blue screen. No menu’s or icons, just a blank blue screen. The server software is running, THANK GOD. Everything seems to work fine but no desktop on the eMac. Is there a fix without have to reinstall anything?

You would probably connect to your system via ssh from another system and do this part of the set of steps

sudo mv /System/Library/CoreServices/oldServerVersion.plist /System/Library/CoreServices/ServerVersion.plist

which (in theory) puts the version info back as it was.

Just FYI, this works under 10.4.11 Server as well, thanks for the tip!

I didn’t have any of the problems that John did, maybe he had a typo in his terminal commands.

Will

I tried it in 10.4.11 as well and it worked like a charm! I was going to try to get things to work through CUPS, but this was a LOT easier!

Thanks for the info guys!