How To Set Up Your Unsupported Printer

Question

I managed to get my unsupported printer working, and I'd thought I'd share my experience.
This guide will help you achieve:
Installation of unsupported printers.
Setup of "print services" on network.
A litte background: I have an Okidata C3200n, it's a GDI printer, and relies heavily on the manufacturer dirvers to function correctly on any operating system. Unfortunately for me (and many others) it seems that Okidata has been dragging their feet when it came to publishing drivers in preparation for Lion. They sent out an official announcement (OKI Printer Driver Compatibility with Mac OS X Lion - Revision 1.6) which details expected release dates for various printers. Mine won't be until mid-December, or so. Major bummer there. I use this printer for my daily business in my company, and can't go without it for more than a few days, so waiting until December is clearly not an option.
Having experienced Okidata tech support in the past, and having worked with them to get my printer running on Linux before there was a Linux driver available, I decided to give them a call to see if they would have a work-around, perhaps with some opensource drivers, to tide users over until then. Their response was that I need to down-grade to Snow Leopard, or get a new printer. Some customer support that is. They drag their feet in developing drivers, then ask us to inconvenience ourselves until they get their act together -- not acceptable.
So, having been through this before in Ubuntu, I remember Foomatic CUPS print drivers. This is where the almost pain-less solution comes in. This process does involve some command-line work, but I'll try to spell everything out as clearly as possible here.
Log on to your LION server (or desktop, but in my situation I am setting up a network printer) using your admin account (I use Local Admin, but your setup may vary).
Download Foomatic-RIP and Ghostscript for Mac and install them: http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/openprinting/macosx/foomat ic
Locate your printer: http://www.openprinting.org/printers
If you printer page lists a driver for download, go ahead and install it. You should be good to go and the driver should be available to use on LION. If your printer lists a Filter (in my case foo2hiperc), continue reading.
Download WGET to your Downloads folder from here: http://www.techtach.org/wget-prebuilt-binary-for-mac-osx-lion.
Download and install Mac Ports from here: Mac Ports for Lion.
Download and install XCode from the AppStore: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/xcode/id448457090?mt=12
Open Terminal and enter the following:
sudo port install gsed
cd ~/Downloads
wget -O foo2zjs.tar.gz http://foo2zjs.rkkda.com/foo2zjs.tar.gz   sdff  
tar zxf foo2zjs.tar.gz
cd foo2zjs
make
sudo make install (you may need to enter your admin password at this time, it will prompt you if you do)
sudo make cups
Now, if everything went well (if you didn't see any error messages), we're all done with command-line. Let's get your printer up and running. Open Safari and browse to http://localhost:631. This is your CUPS printer admin area (why Apple didn't make a full-fledged server admin GUI I have no idea). You may need to authenticate, again with your local admin user.
Click on the Administration tab, then click the Add Printer button.
Choose your printer. If it is not listed, select the appropriate protocol. (I like using IPP.)
If you selected a protocol, enter the destination details here. For example you may need to enter your printer's IP address. Then click Continue.
Now you can name your printer to something readable and friendly, as well as give it a location, if you have multiple printers in different rooms or buildings. Be sure to check "Share this printer." to make it available to all your networked LION client machines. Again, press Continue when ready.
On this screen you will be selecting the driver for your printer. Click the Select Other Manufacturer button, and select the manufacturer of your printer and hit Continue. You will now see a list of updated drivers. One of these should be the foomatic or foo2hiperc driver we just installed. Highlight the corresponding driver for your printer, and click the Add Printer button.
Lo and behold, you now have a networked printer set up on your server. I know what you're thinking now ... you're dreading having to do this on all of the client machines as well, right? Luckily, this is where I think the hidden genius of Apple lies. They know why they dropped support for custom drivers. By using CUPS server on the LION clients as well, they can speak to the server directly in CUPS native language, leaving the server to interpret how it needs to be sent to the printer. GENIUS!
You should now be able to scurry on over to your LION client machine and see the shared printer available to install. It will automatically install itself and the driver it needs without hastle.
I would like to give credit to my brother Sebastian Bronner, who helped me find the right resources. I put these steps together based on the instructions at http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/openprinting/macosx/foomat ic and http://foo2hiperc.rkkda.com/, made available by the OpenSource community.
Please let me know if you have any issues or questions, and if this solution helped you.
Best of luck,
~Mike

Answer 1

Thanks for this - I also have an OKI (a C5500) and this is a Godsend as I would struggle to replace it.
A couple of comments:
Points 6 and 7 should be switched - MacPorts wouldn't install until XCode was installed. You my also want to expand the XCode instructions to say that the App Store link downloads the installer and that you need to go into Launchpad and run it to fully install XCode.
The gsed installation also popped up and asked me to install Java (through Software Update). I did this and the installation of gsed continued and completed succesfully.
If wget is in the Downloads folder, the command you have to use it in point 8 should be prefaced with ./ as it's the local folder it will run from.
You have an extraneous line right below the wget command (sdff).
Otherwise, this is a really excellent procedure.
Many thanks,
Des