Hi.  More musings about random stuff.  (^&

(FWIW: The Athlon is not fast enough for everything that I want to do
under Monopolysoft, after all.  But it's fast enough to be bearable.
"I Blame Monopolysoft".)

The short question: What is a good PostScript printer to specify in
MonopolySoft '98 for talking to a GhostScript-based NetBSD print-server?


The details:

As I've discussed here recently, I have set up an Athlon that was my NetBSD
fileserver, now running Monopolysoft.  This was done basically by swapping
disk drives (and other hardware).  By and large, I'm happy with the
transition.

However, I wanted the Monopolysoft system to integrate into my network.
Using ssh and CVS to move bits around isn't always very satisfying.

After futzing about for too long with trying to find an NFS and lpd
pair of clients (it looks like Cygwin doesn't really do this), I gave
up and installed samba on an isolated laptop.  (Once I get the details
ironed out fully, I'll install samba directly on the fileserver, I think.
But the fileserver is also my primary DNS and hence is visible on the 'net,
so I didn't want to play with samba directly there until I had issues sorted
out.  I'm almost to that point, now.)

Now, most things are working fairly well.  The biggest problem that I have
(which is appropriate to this list) relates to printing.

Over the past few years, I've had 3 different printers attached to one
NetBSD system or another.  2 Epson dot matrix printers, and one HP laserjet.
None natively do PostScript, but I have set up NetBSD print queues to
translate from PostScript to the printer's native language, via GhostScript.
Under NetBSD, this has generally been happy.

Using MonopolySoft, when I print a test-page, the test page prints okay,
and the queues seem to be cleaned out, empty.  However, *after* each
print job, there is a "PCL XL error" sheet written.  The sheet is the kind
of thing that I would sometimes see when using a misconfigured GhostScript
to drive the HP printer.

Does this ring a bell?  Any suggestions?  It's possible that MS is
identifying the HPness of the claimed printer and sending control
language stuff that's confusing GhostScript, so if someone knows of
a *zero* frills PostScript printer that I could tell MS I have,
that might solve the problem.

As far as I can tell, the laptop itself can print just fine, using the
same PS printer to which it redirects documents from MS.

I have tried telling MonopolySoft two different (Laserjet) printers with
the same results---modulo the contents of the test page reporting which
printer driver is selected.


I have a couple of workarounds, if nothing better is suggested:

 * Live with the error sheet.  Take up origami with the spare sheets, or
   something.

 * Bypass the GhostScript and tell the MS computer the real printer that
   I have attached.  (I think that I have all of the infrastructure that
   is required for this, but if I keep the MS system around for a while,
   it is possible that I'll want a different printer.  It's so much more
   elegant to print to PostScript and let "the printer" handle it.)


...since I don't plan to print much from MS, I'd probably lean towards
the former.


Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

-- 
  "I probably don't know what I'm talking about."  http://www.olib.org/~rkr/