Installing Canon LBP 3100 on OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard

Upgrading my Mac from OSX 10.5 Leopard to 10.6 was quite easy - at least more easy than I originally expected. Nearly everything worked out of the box and just a few applications needed some minor tweaking. However, when it comes to printers it’s always a game. If you are lucky and the printer-driver ships with the new version of the operating system, everything is fine. But if not - well, then you might run into problems.

I have one of these printers which are not supported by OSX 10.6: the Canon LBP 3100, a very cheap laser-printer. After upgrading my operating system, the printer was not recognized. Unfortunately the Canon printer-support page did not provide an up-to-date printer-driver and I nearly thought: okay, Nat, that’s it, get you a new printer. But being a tinker when it comes to computers I didn’t give up so fast. And after playing around for some 10 minutes I found a solution which is very easy. However it is not so obvious to find out about that. As I’m pretty sure that there are people out there banging their heads on the wall having a similar problem I thought it would be nice to share my solution with you.

The first step is to download the latest printer-driver from the Canon homepage. I don’t provide a link as by the time you are reading this they might already provide a newer driver. But I’m confident that you can search for the correct driver using your favourite search-engine :)  (just be careful that you download your driver from the manufacturers page only!). Read the rest of this entry »