I just went through some fun (you can replace fun with eye gouging pain) figuring out how to automatically install iPrint printers on Mac OS X.

The first thing I found out is that any version lower than 5.00 from Novell is totally broken and useless in every way. So if you are using iPrint from Novell, you should definately download that and install it on all your Macs.

Once you get that done you have a lovely iprntcmd utility that you can use for all kinds of useful stuff (we'll get into that later), but you still can't upload Mac drivers with a Mac. How difficult would it be to just make iManager work across platforms for Printing Novell? Hmmmm?

So now you have to... gasp... use Windows XP. Its easy enough to just load up VirtualBox and run a session right on your Mac. You are going to need access to all the print drivers on your Mac anyways so copying the ones you need to your home directory and sharing them out to your VirtualBox VM is pretty easy and useful. If you don't run it in a VM on your Mac, then you will need to share or copy whatever print drivers you will need to upload to your iPrint servers so you can get to them from a Windows XP box of some type.

So upload the drivers already (RTFM on Novell's website if you don't know how to upload and assign drivers for iPrint). I'm really putting this up here so I can remember it anyways and I already know how to do that! :)

Now the fun begins.

To install a printer just type:

iprntcmd -a ipp://iprintserverhere/pathtoqueue

So I've been working on getting all the Mac Workstations setup to use ARD at the college that I work for. I ran ARD on our Xserve to search for and capture all the Macs in one of our labs. But since then I haven't been able to remote into the Xserve. I keep on getting the following error.

An administration application is currently running on this computer and will not allow you to remotely control the screen

Well that stinks! Now I have to go way up to the computer room and see what is going on. Or do I? Heck no! I figured that the "administration application" that was currently running must have been ARD. So I can just kill it from the command line. So I ssh'd into the server and ran:

ps aux |grep Remote

That lists anything running with the word Remote in it. ARD is listed as "Remote Desktop". So I copied its PID number and ran:

kill -9 [PID of Remote Desktop]

Then I could once again remote control the Xserve from my desktop. However I wanted to make sure I wouldn't have to go through this all again. So I started poking through the preferences of ARD. Under "Security" I found a check box called "Allow control of this computer when this application is running". I checked it and now I can remote into the Xserve just fine again.

I love ssh!

I purchased a Macbook Pro about 6 weeks ago. Its been great for the most part. Rather than immediately putting Kubuntu on it, I've been forcing myself to learn OSX. I like it, but its not all that much different than my Linux user experience has been. In fact, when it comes to USB audio devices, its been worse. Linux was 100% plug and play for all of my audio devices. Two of which are my Belkin TuneStudio and my SoundBlaster Extigy. I use the TuneStudio  to record podcasts on Skype. It works awesome! Just plug in your iPod and you have a very reliable, simple, almost pro quality device for recording with your computer. The Extigy is just a play awesome usb device. Even though its old it just rocks. Lots of digital options and very high quality sound.

On my Macbook, the TuneStudio worked, but the Extigy didn't. I tried one fix found at this thread on the Apple Support forums. Basically you replace the AppleUSBAudio.kext file with an older version. But it didn't seem to work and, in fact, made the problem worse because now both the TuneStudio and the Extigy didn't work. I kept looking and found a related post that also replaces the IOAudioFamily.kext file as well. Once I did that everything worked. I didn't even need a reboot. Here are the steps that I took.