Mac OS X forum: Fixing Printers that are non 10.6 Compliant

I have a Konica Minolta Bizhub C451 Printer

I noticed that the drivers are not yet 64 bit compliant so I searched KM web site and download the latest drivers in the hope that they would be compliant (They were not)

So the fix here (Mainly Safari, iCab & Textedit, is to open them in 32 bit mode (Command I, more information, click open in 32 bit mode).

After installing I could not print with a message saying the drivers were not correctly installed.

I then decided to compare my /Library Folder with another compuuter on the network which was printing but whose drivers were left unchanged after the 10.6 install.

On that Macintosh I noticed that the /Library/Printers/PPDs/Contents/Resources/ folder no longer had KM Printer drivers in it. I searched using several search engines, including revealing invisible files and came to the conclusion that they had metamorphasised somehow.

I then remembered reading that apple have now embraced the CUPS technology in 10.6 so I concluded that the drivers had been converted to a CUPS document somewhere. I noticed that /Library/Preferences/jp.konicaminolta.printers.C451.C451_TCP_I_P was modified at the time that I installed SL onto it some days ago.

I reasonably concluded that SL looked at the active printer drivers whilst installing the new system and converted them at installation to some sort of CUPS document..

I then installed the latest KM drivers I could find (from the US site) version 4.3

I then affirmed that the printer still came up with an error saying the drivers had not been installed correctly.

I then restarted my computer from a 10.6 Install volume and reinstalled 10.6 over the top of the previous installation.

Upon restart I noticed again that the KM drivers had disappeared from their previous correct folder and that the C451 now is printing correctly again.

I would suggest the temporary work around of

(1) Installing the latest drivers available

(2) Restart from a SL Startup volume

(3) Run disk utility to repair permissions (this is always good housekeeping on a Mac)

(4) Install SL over the top of the current installation

(5) This will provide a fix.

I would postulate that this fix would be common to a number of printers whose drivers are not yet 10.6 compatible.

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