mattgadient.com

When you can’t count on HP, the Linux community is fortunately there for us Mac users.

No, there are no “HP Certified” drivers. Yes, there are Mac ones.

I pulled the information from a thread here. Thanks goes out to craigverse for the info.

Before going any further, Leopard users seem to have a very high success rate using the 1st package listed (the drivers I used). Snow Leopard users however have been met with very mixed results – some get it working, and others don’t. If you try and it doesn’t work, there are many possible side-effects: you may end up with printers permanently listed that don’t work, you may have conflicts with other installed printers, and there could be other issues.

First of all, you’ve got to download 3 programs. You can find them at  http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/OpenPrinting/MacOSX/hpijs. The ones you’re looking for are foo2jzs, Foomatic-RIP, and gplgs (choose the gplgs that corresponds whatever verson of OS X you happen to have).

If you’re a little lazy, I’ve zipped all 3 and uploaded them here:
MacOSX_HP_Color_LaserJet_1600_drivers.zip (drivers I used)
MacOSX_HP_Color_LaserJet_1600_drivers_new.zip (new drivers with SL support – not tested)

To install, do it in this order (I bolded the important parts of the names in case you download slightly newer versions):

1. Install gplgs-8.63-ub.dmg
2. Install foomatic-rip-2008-01-30.dmg
3. Install foo2zjs-1.1.2-ub.dmg Note that the one I included in the package is for OSX 10.3, 10.4, and 10.5 (also 10.6 for the new package but read below first). If you’re using 10.2 you’ll want to download the 10.2 files instead. It’s worth noting there’s a terminal/text part of the install you’ll have to answer questions in (for me #2 was the LaserJet 1600).
   -
   Note that for Snow Leopard (the 2nd package), hpijs is there in place of foo2zjs and it’s not listed as supporting the 1600 – some seem to have success while many do not – you may want to read through a few comments and see. Alternately you may want to try foo2hp instead although this has NOT BEEN TESTED.
   -

4. Once installed, go to System Preferences, Printers, and add the printer – a driver should now be showing up similar to this:
   
5. Once that’s done, type the following in your browser (or you can click the link):
   http://localhost:631/
   and press enter. This will open up a printer configuration page.
6. Go to:
   Manage Printers
   Set Printer Options
   Color Mode: CHANGE TO COLOR
   

If do skip steps #5 and #6, the printer will only print in black and white.

You may want to print a test page to ensure it’s working properly:
Home
Manage Printers
Print Test Page

That’s it! You should be good to go!

1. Try using your normal login username/password. Probably won’t work, but give it a try anyway.
2. Try the username “root”  (no quotes) along with your password. Try “root” and no password. Again, probably won’t work, but try it again anyway.
3. It’s very possible the “root” account isn’t enabled on your system. Read http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1528 on Apple’s site for instructions on how to enable the root account (listed under the How to enable the root user section of that page). It’s 6 steps for Mac OS 10.5 (earlier versions are 12 steps). Once you’ve enabled the root account, try logging into http://localhost:631/ again using “root” as the username (no quotes), and the password you created for the root account.

Step 3 should work, but since I’m not able to try it, I can’t say for sure. There’s no harm in enabling the root account, although you may want to disable it once you’ve adjusted the settings for security purposes (instructions to disable it again are on the same Apple support page).

Please leave a comment if you ran into the password issue, and whether or not the instructions in the follow-up solved it. Thanks.