Zit Seng's Blog

A Singaporean's technology and lifestyle blog

Mac OS X Lion Pains

Actually, there aren’t many pains. It wasn’t too difficult to learn “natural scrolling”. It gets a little confusing when you’ve got to go back to a Windows PC that does not have “natural scrolling” configured, but fortunately, I don’t use a Windows PC all that often. I usually can make do with Windows running in VMware Fusion on my MBP, and natural scrolling works there, naturally. The way Mail.app has rearranged my mail working space took more effort to get used to. I think I probably missed several emails because they became hidden behind threads that I had assumed have already been read.

The biggest pain, and then again it isn’t something that bugs me on a daily basis, but can be really annoying when it does… is printing. The Lion prints. Except that in Apple’s haste to abandon Samba, it seems they have forgotten about printing to Windows shared printers. For some reason, Lion cannot print to printers that are served through Windows SMB shares.

Considering that most enterprises would likely have Windows deeply entrenched in their corporate network, I didn’t think this would be something that Apple would have overlooked. Apple’s newer SMB implementation was supposed to be more forward looking, supporting methods new in Windows Vista and Windows 7. I thought perhaps the problem was with old servers in my organization.

Now, I’m not so sure. Did Apple really royally mess up Windows printing? It just seems so shocking. Did no Lion beta tester ever had to print to a Windows shared printer? It sounds quite unbelievable.

I don’t print that much. Definitely not on a daily basis. But it certainly makes printing a very cumbersome task now if I had to get something printed.

2 thoughts on “Mac OS X Lion Pains

  1. Hi there,

    Someone posted this on the Apple forum (https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3216717?start=15&tstart=0). I’m not sure if this will work w/ our COM1 printer as I can’t find Lexmark printer in the list. I’m trying to download the Lexmark printer driver for Lion. Not sure if it’s gonna work, really hope it will cause otherwise it’ll really very painful for us! 🙂

    Thanks!
    Penny
    ——————————
    I had exactly this problem and I finally found a solution which worked for me at http://www.teknoids.net/content/re-mac-lion-not-printing-windows-print-server

    You can add a printer using cups and it will be ok, just follow this
    instructions:
    1. Point Safari to http://localhost:631
    2. Select top menu “Administration”
    3. Select “Add Printer”
    4. Authenticate if requested
    5. Select “Windows printer via spoolss” and press “Continue”
    6. Use the following sintaxe to add the printer
    “smb://DOMAIN;LOGIN:PASSWORD@SERVER/PRINTQUEUE” in the “Connection”
    field and press “Continue” (replace CAPITALS with your own
    configuration)
    7. Introduce a name in the “Name” field, for example MyPrinter
    8. Select your printer Manufacturer from the “Make” list and press
    “Continue”
    8. Select your printer Model from the “Model” list and press “Add
    Printer”

    1. Thanks. It looks like there is some change to the SMB connect string syntax. For some reason, I still cannot add this via the System Preferences GUI, even though the printers.conf it generates looks to be the same as what CUPS web interface produces. But at least printing works now.

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