On Thu, 24 Feb 2005, Steve Rikli wrote:

> I'd like to put my SPARCclassic (or similar sun4m) to work as
> a printserver, hosting an HP deskjet via the parallel port.
>
> dmesg seems to think it's got the port:
>
> bpp0 at sbus0 slot 4 offset 0xc800000 level 2 (ipl 3): DMA rev 2
>
> MAKEDEV produced what seem to be the right stuff too, I think:
>
> crw-------  1 root  wheel  107,   0 Feb 24 20:20 bpp
> crw-------  1 root  wheel  107,   0 Feb 24 20:20 bpp0
> crw-------  1 root  wheel   37,   0 Feb 24 20:16 lpt0
> crw-------  1 root  wheel   37, 256 Feb 24 20:16 lpt0ctl
>
> Printing via the standard NetBSD lpd to /dev/lpt0 typically
> results in no output on the printer, flashing the "printer
> offline" LED, and lpc reports "waiting for dj to become ready
> (offline ?)".
>
> echo/cat some text to /dev/bpp0 directly usually gets something
> printed -- not all the text consistently, though.
>
> The printer seems ok -- parallel printing via an i386 box works
> as expected.  But using a SPARCclassic would be cooler.  :-)
>
> So, before headscratching much further, I'm wondering if this
> is a "should just work" setup, or if the bpp parallel port
> driver/hardware(?) isn't quite there on SPARCclassic et al.

The SPARCclassic, and I think the SPARC20, had a design flaw where the
pullup resistors on the parallel port were either too large or too
small, I forget which. In any case, I had to call Sun to get a
motherboard replacement for my SPARCclassic before it would print out
the parallel port. This was back when I was running Solaris 2.5.1, btw.
I still have the same 'classic.

I think you can replace the resistor pack to fix this problem.

-- 
Hisashi T Fujinaka - htodd@twofifty.com
BSEE(6/86) + BSChem(3/95) + BAEnglish(8/95) + MSCS(8/03) + $2.50 = latte