The upgrade to macOS 11 ‘Big Sur’ has been mostly successful for me, except that I can’t install drivers for my trusty old Dell C1760nw printer. After a bit of playing, I’ve found a way around this.

First off, it’s worth knowing that the Dell C1760nw colour laser printer is actually a rebadged version of the Xerox Phaser 6000B printer. The Xerox printer drivers are more recent than Dell’s, but sadly they still don’t support Big Sur. I have a solution however, if you’re comfortable with a bit of command line manipulation.

First download (but don’t install) the latest Phaser 6000 drivers from Xerox.

You should now have the file 6000_6010_Print_Installer_v2_6.dmg in Downloads.

Open a Terminal window and issue these commands:

hdiutil mount ~/Downloads/6000_6010_Print_Installer_v2_6.dmg

cp /Volumes/6010\ 6000\ Print\ Installer/6010\ 6000\ Installer.pkg /tmp

cd /tmp

pkgutil --expand-full 6010\ 6000\ Installer.pkg expanded

cd /tmp/expanded/installationfiles.pkg

sudo cp -a Payload/Library/* /Library

Now open Printers & Scanners in Mac System Preferences.

Add Printer and give the IP address of your Dell printer, selecting Line Printer Daemon (LPD) as the Protocol.

In the ‘Use’ drop-down menu at the bottom choose ‘Select software’ and choose ‘Xerox Phaser 6000B v2.6’

Next you should get an error message saying the printer software was installed incorrectly. Don’t be concerned, this is a good sign!

Select ‘Repair’ to let macOS do its magic and your Dell C1760nw printer will be ready for use.

December 2022 update: I have tested this same installation method on a fresh macOS Ventura build and confirm that it still works.