On Fri, 25 Feb 100, Eduardo E. Horvath wrote:

>
>> I'm trying to find out if the LPVI / SparcPrinter is supported by NetBSD.
>> I can't seem to find any definitive answer.  I have a SparcStation 1+ that
>> I'd like to upgrade from SunOS, and have been told that Solaris won't run
>> well on 28M of RAM.  Linux does not support the LPVI at this time.  I'm
>> uncertain of OpenBSD.
>
>I doubt you'll find any drivers for the lpvi interface.  The lpvi
>device is not a parallel interface, rather a video frame buffer.  The
>workstation renders the image into the buffer and then somehow tells
>the printer to print it.  The problem is that I have never seen any
>technical specifications describing the lpvi hardware, and considering
>the age and status, such documentation may not exist anymore, even at
>Sun.
>
>The good news is that thaere are a number of people who have shown
>interest in writing a driver for this card if you can ever manage to
>acquire the necessary documentation.

Have a look at http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/aladdin/devices.html.
It mentions a user-contributed ghostscript device driver for the
SPARCprinter.  I think the problem is that you'd also need a kernel
device driver for the interface - isn't it an Sbus card with one
Centronics port and one funny SPARCprinter port?


Roger

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