On Sun, 16 Jan 2000, der Mouse wrote:

> > If you search for lpvi on the web, you can also come across the
> > pinouts for the lpvi port.
> 
> > SparcLinux has a lpvi driver.

I'm afraid I have to take that back.  When I searched a month ago I found
various discussions on the linux kernel mailing lists, but apparently no
one ever finished a driver.  Boy is it a pain trying to find anything out
about non-intel linux.

There are, however, sample drivers in the NeWS package that shipped from
Sun (no I don't know where you can find them).

  ../NeWS/devkit/examples/SPARCprinter/src/engine_ctl_SPARCprinter.c
  with include files in the 
  ../NeWS/devkit/examples/SPARCprinter/install
  directory.

> So "mknod /dev/bpp0 c 107 0" (plus chmod if you feel so inclined).

Aha!  Cool.  Could this be added to MAKEDEV?

> interface.  My current printer is a Canon BJ-200, which in general has
> to be fed bitmaps; this would be no worse.

It's actually remarkably speedy.  It takes a very short time (a second
or two) to transfer the bitmap over -- most of the time is spent by ghostscript.

From: Greywolf <greywolf@starwolf.com>:

> I believe they have had functional drivers for them up until Solaris
> 2.4. No guarantees after that.

True, but you can download the necessary kernel module from Sun, install
that, and use ghostscript to drive the printer.  Works fine for me under
Solaris 2.6.

From: David Evans <dfevans@bbcr.uwaterloo.ca>:
>   But the concept doesn't *have* to suck.  It was pretty workable on
> black NeXT hardware.  Was it Sun's software or hardware that made it so bad?

Software.  Using ghostscript instead of Sun's software isn't too bad if
you've got enough RARM.

  -- MW