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Airport Extreme Printing

Written by: Tony Herman | Sunday, September 21, 2008 | Apple, Macs, OS X

I recently got an Apple Airport Extreme for my home network. It’s supposed to let me be able to hook up a printer and external drive to it and then have it available to all computers on the network. Sweet!

I tried getting my printer, an HP Officejet 5600 Series, to work using the Airport Extreme but it did not work. I could get it to work fine when connecting via USB but not over the network (Apple’s Bonjour network). I had tried to download drivers from HP, but that didn’t work. So today
I did some searching, installed a few things and I got it to work – here are the details…

First, my sources:

HP OfficeJet 5600 series via Windows XP SP2
(thread at Apple Support Discussions)

OpenPrinting/MacOSX/hpijs

There are 2 types of OSX drivers: Carbon and CUPS. Carbon drivers are used when you connect via USB. CUPS is used on the network and for Windows printing. So there are open source CUPS drivers for a whole bunch of printers, including my HP Officejet in a third party software install.

So what you do is:

  1. Go to the OpenPrinting link shown above.
  2. Download these disk images:
    1. Foomatic-RIP
    2. gplgs
    3. hpijs
  3. You’re then going to install that software in the same order listed above (this is important).

After doing that, you can now install printers found on the network.

Have fun.
-T