Ohforchrissake! What are we… hens clucking at each other through the fence?
Why do you feel printing on Mac OS is a "pain in the ass" (PITA)?
If you have a postscript compatible printer, it's about the easiest thing in the world? I just install the Laserwriter 8 drivers Mat mentioned and I am basically good to print anything?
I have my postscript compatible modern Kyocera printer hooked up to the network switch and I print stuff from both my 8600 and my G4 in no time. All I did was the cabling, installing the drivers and creating a generic printer to have my networked printer show up.
Please take note of the
bolded words above.
Your solution works for
you. That's great. I'm happy for you.
My new Epson printer/scanner/ink cartridge gobbler… with its Ethernet port, built-in WiFi, scanner and soda dispenser will NOT respond to the old Laserwriter ppd or for that matter, to OS9 in general. I
was able to find an Epson OSX 10.5 driver for it. That was as far back as they went and I was probably lucky to find even that.
I know that some of us around here have a instinctive adversity to anything Apple built after 1999.
That does not include
all of us, however.
Yup. I'm one of those blasphemous anarchists. I chose to buy my Epson because it prints and scans and even faxes (that's right, I said
faxes) for my:
OSX / OS9-running MDD
my Catalina-running Macbook Pro
my wife's Monterey-running Macbook Pro
my (gasp) iPhone and even
my iPad !!!
ALL over WiFi with ZERO setup needed AT ALL… EXCEPT FOR (what else,) the MDD. I have it hard-wired to the router for speed (and because the router is only 6 feet away anyway) but I had to find an old Airport card (packrat - had one) because the Epson required WiFi for OSX 10.5. It's not so much that they locked old Macs out, they were just so determined to make it effortless over WiFi that they left out the ability to manually configure stuff and the Mac driver wouldn't access Ethernet. Go figure… or go
configure… nyuk nyuk
Yes, as I have noted before, I run my studio in OS9.
I have contact, song catalog and other databases in Filemaker Pro in OS9.
RANT:
* I also have a great big bunch of graphic design files (CD cases and labels, posters, advertising etc etc) created with Adobe Illustrator in OS9 AND CS3 in OSX that I can no longer access because Adobe has timed-out ALL CS suites and shut off the authorization server! No matter you paid for it, no matter you have ALL of the original discs and serials, too bad… it's NO SOUP FOR YOU.
…I really hope I never have to go back and try to untangle those because I think it's probably 50-50 that a current subscription to the Adobe stuff will even open them… because that's just the kind of assholes they are.I do 90% of my music production
in OS9. There are however, some apps and plugins that ONLY exist
in OSX. That's why I dual-boot the MDD. Every now and then, I toss a file over from OS9, process it somehow and toss it back. I also use OSX to upload and download huge audio files regularly. Try to do
that in OS9 and see which servers are willing to talk to you. Hell, if it wasn't for Knezzen, this entire Forum might be at risk!
So, I make
no apologies for that. Again, I make
NO apologies for that.
OS9 is now old enough to drink in every state in the USA. All PPC versions of OSX will also be that old in just a few years.
It's a fun exercise (I guess) to find ever more complex ways to keep "obsolete" hardware and software more-or-less functioning year after year in a society that has long ago left it all in the rear-view. I am especially intrigued by those who use QEMU (sorry DH), entire auxiliary servers and everything else Alpha to Zeta just to sneak around TLS to get Classilla to render half-ass pages out of the Javascript-laden layouts it can only perceive as hieroglyphics.
To anyone who bothers to read all of this, I trust you see my point. If so, great! If not, well at least I feel better…