Sharing a Canon laser printer between OSX and XP

5 January 2008

In case anyone else runs into this problem in the future, here are the steps needed to share a Canon Imageclass 4140 laser printer between OSX and XP. I’ve only tested this under Leopard, but it should work for Tiger as well.

First, the problem. While the printer works fine attached to the XP machine, print jobs sent from the Mac disappear into the ether without actually printing. According to the Canon guy I spoke to, chances are this is because the mac is sending Postscript data which the XP driver doesn’t know how to handle. Conversely the printer also works fine attached to the mac (as long as you use the most recent drivers, currently version 1.6), however the XP machine is unable to connect to the printer. In the Printers and Faxes window you just get an ‘Access denied, unable to connect to the printer’ error.

In order to make the two play nice, first we need to edit the smb.conf file on the OSX machine. In terminal, type:

sudo pico /etc/smb.conf

Scroll down to the [printers] section and add the line:

use client driver = yes

I also set the ‘guest ok’, and ‘printable’ settings to ‘yes’ as well.

Save the file, then try to add the printer on the XP machine. This should get you past the access denied error, but you still can’t print. Finally, change the printer driver on XP to the Apple Laserwriter driver (any of them should work), which lets the XP machine send Postscript data to the mac.