The Epson 2200 and Mac OS X Panther


If you've been having trouble getting your Epson Stylus Photo 2200/2100 working under OS X Panther (v10.3.x) then hopefully I'll be able to help you through this rather big PITA.

We all know that Epson's support for OS X is, um, rather lacklustre. And we also know that it's pointless to try and spend the US$10 for a support call for your printer since it's probably out of the 90 day warranty. But it is possible to get the 2200 working.

My biggest problem is that I have an old SP 870 that I use for daily printing. I wanted to use both the 870 and the 2200 without problems. What I found was that when I installed the SP 2200 I would try to print but then get the dreaded message:

The ink cartridge combination currently installed in the printer is different from the one installed when the printer was selected in Print Center. Delete the printer from the Printer List in Print Center and then add it again.

Looking around I found a rather handy utillity from Fixamac.net: "Printer Setup Repair" (http://fixamac.net/software/psr/index.html). Running the software solved pretty much all of my issues and now I am able to print to the SP 2200 (and the 870).

Here's how I got things to work:

  1. Remove the /Library/Printers/EPSON directory. Just delete the whole thing en masse.
  2. Run Printer Setup Repair. In particular, be sure to look in the "File Permission Verification & Repair" group. Run the "Verify and repair permissions..." first. Then, and this is the most important part, run "Reset the Printer Setup Utility to remove all listed printers...". If you don't do this, there's little chance you'll get your printer running.
  3. Re-boot your machine.
  4. Install your drivers for the Stylus Photo 2200. In my case, I installed the 870 first and then performed an "Upgrade" for the SP 2200 so it would keep the older 870 driver but install a newer version of the common files like Epson Printer Utility.
  5. When all is said and done, the printer(s) should be working in all their glory.

Hopefully these instructions will help you get your printers working. I banged my head up against the wall for about 6-8 hours trying to get these damn things to work. Hopefully you'll not waste so much time. I'm sure if you know all of the support files (prefs, .xml, .plist, and spool files) for Printer Setup Utility you can go around and delete them all by hand and have the same outcome as using Printer Setup Repair. I don't know what they are and it just seemed to make sense to use the utility that's already around rather than re-inventing the wheel. If you know what they are, let me know and I'll be happy to write a shell script to delete all of them and then publish it here.


Last modified: Sat Jan 29 18:28:55 2005
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