Adding a printer to a Teacher MacBook

December 6, 2010

The information in this post describes the process of adding an printer to a Shoreline School District teacher MacBooks using Open Directory with Mac OS X 10.5.x.

  1. Navigate to the Utilities folder by either going to
    “Macintosh HD/Applications/Utilities” or by using the “Shift-Command-U” keyboard shortcut from the Finder. Note: on student laptops the “Add Printer” shortcut is located in the “Applications” folder.
  2. Open the shortcut to the “Add Printer” application.
  3. In the “Add Printer” application window select “Default”  from the icon bar at the top of the window.
  4. If Open Directory is configured correctly on your machine you will see a list of all available Open Directory (and Bonjour) printers available at your site. If you only see “Bonjour” printers then Open Directory is not configured on your machine. Please contact the Help Desk at 4911 to have Open Directory setup. If you don’t see any printers listed in the “Add Printer” application then your computer is most likely not connected to the network. Close the “Add Printer” window, verify network connectivity and try again.
  5. Select the printer you wish to add and verify the “Print Using” drop down menu shows the correct driver for your printer. If no driver for the selected printer can be found it will default to using “Generic PostScript Printer”.  While it is preferable to have the printer manufacturers driver installed the “Generic PostScript” driver will often work just fine.
  6. Click “Add” to finish adding your printer.
  7. At this point the “Add Printer” window will close automatically. If you wish to add another printer just repeat the process.

Additional Information

It is important to note that some of our printers are intentionally not listed with Open Directory and/or Bonjour. To add these printers you will need to obtain the IP address of the printer and enter it in manually by selecting “IP” from the icon bar at the top of the “Add Printer” application window.

You can also open the “Add Printer” application by selecting “Print” from within any Mac OS X application. In the print dialog box just select “Add Printer” from the “Printer” drop down menu.

Filed under:
Printing by admin

Comments are closed.