Being the crazy early adopter that I am (do NOT try this at home), I installed Mac OSX 10.3 Panther the night it went on sale (we went to the launch at the Apple Store). I love it — one great new feature is an enhanced printing system, which includes the return of Desktop Printers (apple’s slowly putting back all of OS9’s functionality), better windows printing, and overall better compatibility using the Gimp Print open source drivers.

Despite the improvements, one problem I had was that my Brother HL-5040 printer was not working after the upgrade. Read on to find the solution!

(I actually performed an Archive and Install, which saves your user settings and documents and moves them to a clean install of the operating system. Highly recommended over “upgrading”. In the installer you choose Options before the installation begins, where you’ll get to select Upgrade, Archive and Install, or Clean install.)

Anyhoo, The basic symptoms were that the print job would start, then almost immediately the print queue would stop.

Because this printer emulates a LaserJet and the PCL language, I was able to get the printer to work with several of the HP LaserJet CUPS+GimpPrint drivers To do this, simply choose HP and then scroll to one of the LaserJet drivers when selecting your printer in the Printer Setup Utility. Unfortunately they were all limited to 600×600 (the printer does 1200dpi), and the overall quality wasn’t as good as the native drivers.

After only a few days the folks at All OSX came up with a solution.

It’s an installer with a script that apparently recreates some users that somehow don’t get created by default. (No files are actually installed).

This worked great with my Brother HL 5040.

Once I ran the installer and added the printer again, it worked like a champ.

One caveat — after accessing the CUPS web-interface , the printer stopped working again and I had to run the installer a second time.

Works like a champ now though.

Thanks to AllOSX