Quick tip - Use a mac running 10.5 or 10.4, select to share the Printer that is AppleTalk and volia - your AppleTalk printer is now useable to any Mac with 10.6
It is true that Apple has dropped the AppleTalk LAN protocols as part of the trimming done in 10.6 Snow Leopard. It doesn’t necessarily mean its time to throw out that legacy LaserJet printer that had its printer queue setup through AppleTalk. You could setup a print server.
If you have at least one Mac still running 10.5 or earlier on your network, you can setup your AppleTalk printer on that machine and share that printer with the other computers on your Network. Then use Printer Sharing to allow your Snow Leopard machines to still print to it. The Mac doing the Sharing would accept print jobs from the other computers as long as it was powered up and running when you wanted to print.
To use printer sharing go to “Sharing” under system preferences and enable the “Printer Sharing” service. Then, under “Print & Fax” click the box for Share this printer. Now your legacy printer can still be used with Snow Leopard.
—- UPDATE 9/4/09 by OWC Grant—–
Our own OWC Jamie created a very well illustrated guide that walks you thru the above step by step. If you’re like me, a picture (or in this case several screen shots) is worth a thousand words…or at least three paragraphs!
