Printer Driver deployment

[jwojda]

I'm trying to package a Firey printer driver from Canon. I dragged the installer into CasperAdmin, but it goes in as a script. I thought about just grabbing the installer file out of the Show Contents option, but there's several installers in there.

Has anybody tried to package these drivers? In the past, I haven't had good luck with Composer capturing the drivers. Is there another way?

[JPDyson]

You could probably just pull the actual driver files from /Library/Printers (or have Composer watch for changes; could be in the cups directory as well).

[hkim]

With Canon Fiery drivers, after looking at the script and doing some testing, I found it best to package up the whole Canon installer to throw itself into say /private/tmp and have a simple postscript script to run the OSX Installer.pkg file (which seems to do the trick in my case).

sudo installer -pkg /private/tmp/GX300/Fiery Driver Installer.app/Contents/Resources/User Software/OSX/Printer Driver/OSX installer.pkg -tgt /

[jwojda]

I came across this post too - https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/discussion.html?id=6863

[donmontalvo]

When it comes to Fiery (EFI) or Creo rips, it's generally best practice to (1) download/push the latest driver installer from the vendor site (most likely properly packaged already), and then (2) pull the PPD directory off the RIP or server (using curl) and use it to configure the printer on the Mac (using lpadmin):

/usr/bin/curl http://hostname.domain.com:8080/myfancyppd.txt /private/tmp/myfancyppd

/usr/sbin/lpadmin -p MyFancyPrinter -v smb://hostname.domain.com/MyFancyPrinter -E -P /private/tmp/myfancyppd -D 'MyFancyPrinter' -L 'MyFancyOffice'

By pulling the PPD directory off the RIP or server, you'll never get burned because of a not-quite-the-exact-ppd-required problem. ;)

318's own William Smith wrote an excellent article on lpadmin.

http://techjournal.318.com/mass-deployments/configure-network-printers-via-command-line-on-macs/

Don