Greetings to all...

First, an ethernet data point/success story:

I've had an SE/30 running -current for some time now, and I finally broke
down and bought an ethernet card to hook it up to my primary machine (a
7100/66). The card works great! (It's an Asante MacCon something-or-other I
got from LLB.) I get about 130K/second transferring the X11R6 distribution
tarballs from MacOS to NetBSD, and it hasn't paniced (sp?) or scrambled
data yet. I've gotten a few error messages about the card right at boot
time, but they don't seem to affect operation, and they only occur during
boot. (If anybody is interested in the exact card model or error messages,
send me mail or reply to the list.) Kudos to those who did the ethernet
drivers! 


And now for something completely different...

I'm working on a ghostscript driver for the old Apple Stylewriter I. Since
I have no docs on the control codes for the printer, I started by capturing
the serial data the Apple printer drivers send back and forth and went from
there. I currently have a MacOS program (mostly standard C) that can run
the printer well enough for my purposes, and I'm looking at how to turn it
into a ghostscript driver.

Turning what I have into a ghostscript driver looks pretty straightforward
-- the ghostscript docs even suggest which existing drivers to use as
examples. The main problem is that the printer doesn't use any conventional
form of flow control (i.e. neither xon/xoff or DTR/CTS). There is a command
which returns a status byte, and the driver uses this byte to tell when the
printer has finished printing what it has and is ready for more data. I
haven't looked into the ghostscript/unix printing architecture very deeply
yet; are drivers that actually need to interact with the printer (i.e.
two-way communication) supported? Will I need to write a special printer
daemon or something? 

Also, if anyone out there has figured out (or seen real docs on)
Stylewriter control codes (and is willing to share), please drop me a line.
I'd really like to know how closely the stuff I figured out matches
reality. :-)


Someone on the list was talking about making netatalk work under NetBSD,
but I never saw anything about it after an initial post a while ago. Did
this ever happen? I took a quick look at the netatalk sources, and it looks
like the kernel stuff is just a Loadable Kernel Module, but it's written
for SunOS; I'd have quite a bit of learning to do before I could even think
about making a NetBSD version. (Do lkm's even work in NetBSD/mac68k? They
don't seem to be enabled in any of the default config files...) 


One more thing (I know this has been talked about before, but I don't remember
what the answer was).  Are the patches to X11R6 for NetBSD/mac68k available
somewhere?


Thanks to all who read this far,  ;-)
-- monroe