Mac OS X 10.5: Using printer sharing with different versions of Mac OS X

Using printers being shared by other Macs

When you add a printer in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, you will see printers on your local network that are being shared by other Macs running Mac OS X 10.4 or later. These printers will display "Bonjour Shared" in the Kind column of the dialog sheet.

Advanced: Accessing a printer in Leopard that's shared by Mac OS X 10.2 through 10.3.9

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard uses Bonjour to locate shared printers on your local network, but it does not display printers shared by Mac OS X 10.2 through 10.3.9 which are broadcast to the network using the "cups" protocol. The steps below will allow Mac OS X 10.5 to locate shared printers which are being announced to the network using the "cups" protocol:

1. Open Terminal (located in /Applications/Utilities).

2. Type or paste this command, followed by Return:

cupsctl BrowseProtocols='"cups dnssd"'

The next time you add a printer, you should see printers shared by Mac OS X 10.2 through 10.3.9. These printers will display "Shared Printer" in the Kind column. You may see printers shared by Mac OS X 10.4 or later appearing twice (once as a "Bonjour Shared" printer and once as a "Shared Printer") after completing these steps.

To revert back to the default behavior in Mac OS X 10.5, you can remove "BrowseProtocols dnssd cups" from the CUPS configuration file, or reset the printing system.

Note: Use the same printer driver version on the computer sharing the printer and the computer printing to the shared printer, to avoid a certain issue.