There appears to be a compatibility issue with Mac OSX lion and lots of printers.   (Talked about here on the apple support pages)  The printer may or may not work properly, but you will get an error that says “The optical photoconductor needs to be replaced.”

When I try to print on my new Fuji Xerox document C4350 last week I got an error saying “The optical photoconductor needs to be replaced.” and the printer would not even print.  If you play around with a different print setting (e.g. USB, Jetdirect, LPD, IPP) you may be able to get the printer working (still with the error!) till Apple repairs the problem. Here’s how I got my Xerox printer working.

How to get a Fuji Xerox Printer working with OSX Lion

I just purchased a Fuji Xerox Docuprint C4350, and there have been a couple of issues getting it running.

1. Installing the Drivers

The 1st issue is that the Fuji Xerox drivers from the website do not run under Lion, they are PPC code which means you need to have a PowerPC computer or Rosetta to run the installer. The actual PPD files are fine however, so the workaround is to install the drivers onto an older computer (I used my old G4 Powerbook) and then copy them via thumb drive or e-mail onto your new computer.

In my case the file was called “FX DocuPrint C4350 PS.”  The Installer puts it into the Library/Printers folder and you need to move it anywhere on your Lion machine then when you are selecting the driver  choose ‘Other’ and find the file.

2. “The optical photoconductor needs to be replaced.” ERROR

After setting up the IP address on the printer and then selecting the computer to print using IPP printing, whenever I tried to print I would get the error “The optical photoconductor needs to be replaced.” Not only this –  it would pause the printer queue and not print the page! A little Google search shows that this is a common error under Lion.

In my case I found 2 other ways to get the printer working.
The 1st was simply to plug it in by USB instead of Ethernet printing. This gave me no errors at all and the printing works fine, it’s just a bit slower.

The 2nd way was to still use IP printing but select HP Jetdirect – Socket instead of IPP printing. Xerox calls it port 9100 instead of JetDirect so make sure on your Xerox printer you enable port 9100. This still gives the error, but the printer at least prints the page normally.

I talked with Apple, they couldn’t help. I spend over and hour with the mobileme chat line, and subsequent e-mails and in the end I gave up.

This week I came across this great article which fixed everything! If you’re having issues with Apple address book definitely give this a try.

With Snow Leopard Apple have made the pause button on the remote control ALWAYS start and stop itunes. This means if you are watching TV on your mac, and you go to pause it, iTunes starts playing! There is no way to disable this.

The best workaround it to open itunes, and go to the itunes store. From here the play function will not work. You can then minimise itunes and watch TV!

The first option around this is to ‘force quit’ the installer. Press Apple-option-esc then select ‘Software Update’ and ‘Force Quit’.

If that doesn’t work try deleting the following 2 files from your Library/LaunchDaemons.

com.apple.RemoteDesktop.PrivilegeProxy.plist
com.apple.RFBRegisterMDNS_RemoteManagement.plist

The symptoms of the fault are as follows:

• After being on for a few minutes, your ibook gets a blank black screen, the fan turns on, and the computer freezes.
• You can’t do anything at all except power down the computer by holding the power button.
• You restart and it doesn’t boot up.
• You squeeze the bottom of the computer tightly together just to the left of the trackpad, and it boots up.
• It tends to boot up when it is cold, but then stops working when it warms up.

Here are the results of a survey I conducted here on macintoshhowto.com over a period of 6 months regarding the affected models. It appears all models are affected.

In this article I described the fix for this G4 logic board fault. This survey was to test what models were impacted.

1. Have a look in ~/Library/Spotlight and make sure there are no plugins that might be causing problems. For example, I had an old Mailtags Plugin that was 2 years old, so I deleted it.

2. Make sure you haven’t excluded your mail folder in the spotlight privacy tab (spotlight preferences)

3. Reset the entire spotlight database by opening a terminal window and typing 

sudo mdutil -E -i on /Volumes/*

(It will ask for your password)

4. Open Mail and click on Mailboxes:Rebuild.

That resets spotlight and mailboxes, which I think just about covers all options.