This took me waaaay too long to figure out. A while back I set up printer sharing (with browsing) on my Ubuntu-based server. My Mac (running Tiger at the time) found the server just fine and it all just worked — I couldn’t believe how simple it was! But then I upgraded to Leopard, and among the (numerous) casualties was the shared printer. No matter what I tried, what protocol I used, what driver I used, the shared printer just wouldn’t work. After hours of banging my head against the keyboard I let it go. About 9 months have passed, and today I decided to take one more swing at. Can you believe it? I found the problem! There were two problems really.

First, to access a shared printer on another machine, you have to turn on print sharing on your machine. This defies all logic, but there you go.

Second, for some utterly inscrutable reason Apple decided to *dis*able the CUPS browsing protocol, leaving only Bonjour browsing working. ???? Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. It’s as if they said “let’s make sure Mac users will have lots of trouble printing to Linux servers, that’ll improve our customer satisfaction!” To fix this lameness, do the following:

Combining these two tips, the shared printer finally appeared in the “Default” pane of the new printer dialog and printing to it just worked. Hopefully Apple makes this more sensible in Snow Leopard…