Apple moved to CUPS (common unix printing system) for Panther. That’s all well and good, but in order to do so, they blotted out currently installed vendor drivers. That might have been all well and good, but some of the CUPS drivers aren’t as capable as the commercial versions. Which meant that Amy’s color Epson no longer had a gamma control, and no longer had an option to use black ink only.
Panther means nothing to Amy. She doesn’t care about a new Finder, doesn’t care about Expose, or any of the other “150 new features.” Things were fine in Jaguar, and now her printer was broken, while she was in the middle of a long-term printing project.
Operating system upgrades should add features not remove them. Apple could at least give you the option of using one driver or the other. Fortunately, I discovered that the old drivers do still work, but you have to remove the CUPS driver first. Here’s what I did:
Go into /Library/Printers/Epson and find SP890.plugin.
Ctrl-click | Make Archive to create a zipped version.
Delete the plugin.
Reinstall Epson’s downloadable driver.
Restart.
Back in business, but what a crock.
Tell me about it…
Eugenia and I have have spend many hours today trying to configure our new PowerMac to my liking.
The printer side went fine, but I’ve not dug deep. It prints, and hopefully it’ll be enough for now. I haven’t found yet the option to preview the page within the driver before printing. I’ll go have a look at the “black ink only” option, it’s very sad indeed if they removed it.
The scanner side, on the other hand, was pure hell. I won’t get into details, but getting the driver to install, to accept my license key, to remember my license key, to detect the scanner, and (the worst part) to stop using the old driver after I installed a new one.
I don’t even know what Eugenia had to do to make the keys on my Keytronic keyboard to be in the right order. And I still haven’t found a way to make the mouse behave the way I like it.
So far my MacOS experience has been poor.
CUPS was part of Jaguar too.
>CUPS was part of Jaguar too
Yup, but it now blocks the normal drivers. JBQ read of similar problems other photographers and pro artists had with the official drives being blocked by CUPS on Photoshop…
Read my journal here http://jbq.livejournal.com/ for a summary of my first “real” day with MacOS X. It is said that first impressions matter. Too bad for MacOS, because it left me a very bad first impression.
> CUPS was part of Jaguar too.
True, but Apple wasn’t shipping CUPS drivers (I don’t think). They were just using it as the print transport layer. Now they’ve adopted the whole schmoo.
JBQ, I replied at your site.