Installing Drivers When the Manufacturer's Installer is Crapware
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I have a shoot coming up where I need to provide 4x6 prints to the client's guests nearly immediately after making the photographs so they can take the photo with them that evening. Research led me to the Canon CP100 printer, a dye sublimation system that puts paper and dye sub film into a single box. My MacBook Pro runs El Capitan, the current shipping operating system from Apple. As I have found in the past, Canon's installer is OS version specific, even when it makes no sense to do so. I would be stuck, except for Pacifist.
Charles Srstka developed Pacifist some years back to allow Mac users to get inside prepackaged installers to get at the good stuff without having to deal with crap code and bad design. Pacifist is Shareware costing only $20. I bought a license years ago and while I don't use it every day or even every month, when I need to get at drivers or files that are trapped inside a poorly crafted installer, Pacifist is my go to solution.
It's so simple. I launch Pacifist and point it at the Installer package. It shows all the other installers as well as the files inside the packages. Canon's installer refuses to run under El Capitan, a common issue with Canon's bloated software, but simply right-clicking on the internal installer packages gives me options to install to the default location, to a specific location or simply to extract the files to disk. I chose the default location and in under a minute the printer drivers for the CP910 were installed properly on the MacBook Pro and I was able to run a test print from Lightroom.
Without Pacifist, I would have had to engineer a wireless network at the client location in order to make the prints I will need. Now I will have options, wireless or via cheap, cheerful and quick USB connection.
All of us as photographers and videographers need the support of the manufacturers of the products we use. Sadly these manufacturers may make great products but they aren't software companies and are uniformly slow to release updates and the software itself can be a kludge-fest. If you need to get inside the installer and use a Macintosh as so many of us do, Pacifist might be a utility that you want to own. You can use it for free with a short startup delay, but Charles has built a great tool that will save you time and money. Invest the $20 in this excellent independent software vendor and help him as well as yourself.
Until next time, peace.
