Macos – Why don’t I have any Canon printer drivers on Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks

I had a similar problem. Windows 7 64-bit with canon pixma 4500 which I wanted to share with Vista 32-bit.

Printer worked under Windows 7, connected to the Vista laptop also, but wouldn't share.

I downloaded the canon driver (NOT the add-on module) from canon for 32-bit Vista to the Windows 7 PC.

It comes as a selfextracting executable, but this will not run on Windows 7 64-bit. Exctract it using winzip. You'll end up with a driver folder in which you find the .inf file (in my case ip4500.inf).

It should be possible to add it as a driver for the x86 architecture through start->devices and printers, select you printer, rightclick, select printer properties and then enable the sharing options and select install additional drivers. Click on x86 and press OK. Point to the location of the inf file and press ok. The 32-bit printer driver should be added to your Windows 7 64-bit.

I say 'should' as in my case it did not work immediately. Instead of installing, Windows 7 could not find the proper driver (in my case for 'Canon Inkjet ip4500 series').

To solve this, use notepad to edit the .inf file of the downloaded driver. In it, there are 3 locations where the printer is described as 'Canon ip4500 series'. Add the word 'Inkjet' to it at the right place and try again. It worked for me.

Apparantly, Canon or Microsoft had been so 'wise' to rename the printer from 'Canon ip4500 series' to 'Canon Inkjet ip4500 series'. Windows 7 is so 'smart' to look for an extra driver only on your local PC (rather than find it the same way Windows update will find it) and only based on the (renamed) printer name in the Windows 7 driver (rather than the key provided by the printer itself).

From my experience, Yosemite is using a lot more RAM than 3GB if you run it natively (no emulation). I imagine in virtualised mode it would take even more. I have 16GB installed on my system and Yosemite is using about 4-5 GB without any application running. Once I open other applications and run one or two virtual machines the available RAM can go down almost to under 1GB.

Virtual machines use a lot of RAM in Yosemite for creating file caches. For example, if I run a Windows XP or Mountain Lion VM in VMWare on a base Yosemite system and allocate about 4GB of RAM, VMWare will use more than that for caching files.

This is done for speed purposes, so that if you close the VM and want to open it later, it will take much less time to resume the VM if there is a file cache in RAM, than if there isn't one. You can test this by running sudo purge in the Terminal after you close a virtual machine, then re-opening it. You will notice that resuming the machine is much slower than if you didn't purge the RAM of the file cache.

Also, VMWare seems to not work well/recognise graphic cards in virtualised OS X. For example, I created two virtual machines, one with Windows XP and one with Mountain Lion. The Windows VM can play the same game, altough it's laggy even with 8GB allocated RAM, whereas the OS X VM can't even open the game, the application crashes at start. Which means the virtualised OS X doesn't even recognise there is an emulated graphics card.