Trouble Adding Printer – Permissions Problem…
I just got a new MacBook Pro. Lovely machine, love the new keyboard. Noticeable speed increase.
I migrated my old account to my new machine using the Migration Assistant. I went to print and noticed that my print drivers did not make the leap over to the new machine. No problem, I’ll just add a new printer in the print dialog. Simple, right? Wrong!
When I clicked on Add Printer, a dialog appeared asking me to select a user in the _lpadmin group. Since I am the only user on my machine, I typed my name and password. No dice. I was told to please enter a user in the _lpadmin group. In other words, I am not in that group.
Hmmm…
So I went into Terminal and typed this command:
id davemark
“davemark” is my short name (as you might have guessed). The id command tells you about your id and tells you what groups you are in. I am not in the _lpadmin group. That is not good. Time to turn to Google.
Turns out lots of folks have run into this problem. Not clear what causes it, but fortunately the fix is pretty straightforward, though not at all obvious.
I went back into Terminal and typed this line:
dseditgroup -o edit -p -a admin -t group _lpadmin
If you want to read up on what this command does, type this command in Terminal:
man dseditgroup
In a nutshell, this adds you to the group _lpadmin, which is what I wanted. Worked flawlessly. Here’s the page that turned me on to this command. Thanks, Google!
– Dave
