So one of the issues I’ve had with the MacBook is that whilst it is brand sparkling and shiny new, much of the rest of my hardware is not.
My printer, for instance, is a very nice and usable HP LaserJet 1100. Less than a decade old. No native OS X driver though.
My scanner, a cheapo A4 Packard Bell Diamond Plus 1200 (a rebadged Mustek BearPaw 1200CU) is not recognised by Image Capture.
In both cases, open source software came to the rescue.
The printer is attached to my home Linux server and shared via Samba. The problem is that OS X doesn’t list a driver for it in the Printer Setup Utility. The solution is hpijs. Install the two packages, and it’s all good: the driver now appears in the much-extended list.
The scanner puzzled me for a little bit longer. In the end, I followed the instructions for the Mustek A3 scanner on this page, but downloaded the appropriate gt68xx drivers (ps1fw.usb, PS1Dfw.usb, PS1Gfw.usb – wasn’t sure which one to go for, so I went with all 3). I then edited the SANE settings to uncomment any lines that mentioned the BearPaw 1200 or Diamond Plus 1200 (since I wasn’t sure precisely which one I might need). The upshot is that my scanner now appears in Image Capture through SANE.
Lovely.
you’ll find mac live almost true to the ‘just plug it in’.. I had a epson 1520 a2/a3/a4 printer (which I just sold on ebay) the printer had an Ethernet card in it and it just ‘worked’ by some sort of magic and was visible to OSX without any setup.. the only thing I needed was to pull some open source software to allow me to see the printer cartridge levels and do some 1520 specific tasks, samba support is also pretty handy to have in OSX.. 🙂