All older printers are not working in macOS v11 (Big Sur)

Solution 1:

What worked: I read the error logs on my printers. They pointed me to permission problems with /usr/libexec/cups. Perms should be 755.

To make this work:

• System Integrity Protection should be disabled.
• You must be a sudoer or have root permissions.

Instructions

Open a terminal.

• cd to /usr/libexec
• sudo chmod -R 755 cups

That's it! Printing with older drivers works now! AirPrint works. The scanners work. Apparently Apple screwed up the perms on the cups directory that makes printing work when they created their protected filesystem! Urrgghh! This should work with all older printers regardless of brand.

YMMV.