Hi,
    I finally brought my printer from home out to school, and would like
to be able to use it on my NetBSD boxen.  The printer is an HP DeskJet
550C, and I'll be connecting it either to a NetBSD/sparc box via serial,
or a NetBSD/i386 machine via parallel.  Right now it's on the i386, but
I plan on moving it over to the sparc (especially if the parallel port
is supported on the sparc).  Right now I haven't had any luck getting
software to work with it, however.

    I played with it a bit this summer, and was able to print to it by
printing to a .ps file, running gs with the output device of cdj550, and
then cat'ing this file to /dev/lpt0.  That worked this summer.  I tried
modifying the filters my school uses on their unix boxes to
automatically do the gs conversion and print the file, but when I
actually tried running this the printer just reset constantly and never
printed anything.

    Since updating to 1.3ALPHA (I'm in the process of trying to sup up
to the -current today) I can't even seem to just send the processed file
to lpt0 anymore.  The printer resets, prints the first line of graphics,
then parks, and the cat process just hangs.

    So I have two questions:

1) Any suggestions as to what went wrong with my parallel port setup? 
Did something change that I need to configure something differently? 
This is basically the same kernel config I used before.

2) Since I've never gotten it to work automatically, how can I set up
such a printer to print under NetBSD?  Does NetBSD come with all the
necessary software, or are there freely available packages that have the
necessary filters and such?  The biggest problem seems to be that the
printer doesn't natively speak postscript, you need gs (or something
else) to convert it to what the printer can understand.  I have a friend
that has a similar printer (HP PaintJet) running off his Linux box just
fine (using a printer setup program that RedHat provides).  I guess if
all else fails I can just set up those scripts on my machine.  I'm
hoping there's an actual package for NetBSD, though.  Does it make a
difference whether the printer is on a parallel or a serial port?

Preferably, is there anybody else with a DeskJet who has scripts I could
swipe??  =)

    Thank you in advance.

                                                          Will Ferry

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