Recently while shopping with a friend in the local office supply store we discovered a great closeout buy on a color Laser printer from Hewlett Packard model CP1215. Within a day the friend told me she wanted to buy it, and being cautious as I always am in making a recommendation for her to buy it as cool as it seemed, and as cheap as it was, I insisted we look elsewhere. In the end however we returned to the same store to purchase the HP CP 1215.

HP CP1215 overall is a great cross platform color laser printer!

Upon reviewing the box in the store however we noted What!? NO MAC DRIVERS! This seemed unusual for HP who most always had Mac, Linux and Windows support. My friend was quick to whip out her iPhone and do a quick Google search that yielded some results for installing foomatic printer drivers on her (Original Link gone) OS X to be able to print from her Apple Macintosh (New Link ) here Being somewhat of an Ubuntu geek and having dealt with CentOS , Redhat, and others I was comfortable with what I read and confidently offered to make it work.

Imagine my surprise however after registering on the apple developer site and performing the download suggested on the post that the OSX 10.5 package I need was no longer available! I attempted what was there and after downloading a few gigabytes of an installer, I found that  it would not run on OSX 10.5 . On a whim I did some googling and discovered that the Apple software I needed was on the original OSX disk, thus negating the need for a huge download. After following the instructions the install went off without a hitch!

Not often however do I really get to install linux software on OSX and I soon realized that OSX used CUPS printing , just like linux.  With my Ubuntu machine nearby I connected to the network fired it up enabled discovery of network printers in Ubuntu, and was printing from Ubuntu to the HP Color Laser connected to the Mac.

___________________UPDATE  May 17, 2011____________________

Since originally writing this,  we have connected this printer to Mac OS 10.5, Mac OS 10.4, Ubuntu 10.04 PPC, Ubuntu 10.10 PPC,  Ububtu 10.04 x86,  Ubuntu 10.10 x86 (Mint 10) , Windows, 7 Starter, Windows 7 Ultimate, Windows XP, all via two different print servers. With Android, PrintBot stopped working after a PrintBot software upgrade BOO! The HP android print utility will not recognize the current configuration nor any previous, I think because it requires Bonjour.

___________________UPDATE November 5, 2011____________________

We have now also installed this to Mac OS X 10.6 , however it required updated Ghostsript which worked fine.

Still no printing from iThingies (iThis, iThat), despite testing several apps including HPs own. I guess that HP does not like that we are using a generic HP protocol print server (Same problem on Android with HP app). The one app that I thought might work did not have the driver.

___________________UPDATE April 12, 2012____________________

I have now found a program that will allow printing from android to this printer directly. Because the same program exists for the iThingies (iPhone, iPod, iPad) , it probably will work for printing via a print server as well as a serparate solution for printing through a Mac or Linux computer as a CUPS server. See the link below.

Andriod and iThingy printing- To any configured printer on Mac OS, Linux, and maybe Windows