On Sun, Jan 16, 2000 at 01:07:44AM -0500, der Mouse wrote:

 > I recently acquired a SPARCprinter from a university department that
 > believed they'd have no further use for it (I hope they were right!).

I believe they would be :-)  I think Sun EOL'ed SPARCprinters generations
ago;  I can't even recall whether they brought out drivers for the things
for Solaris 2.x...

 > I've been using a 1999-08-13 source tree.  A kernel built from that
 > tree with the bpp driver turned on ("bpp* at sbus? slot ? offset ?")
 > finds a bpp device there at boot time...but I have no idea how to test
 > it; there is no bpp manpage according to man -k.  One comment in
 > bppreg.h talks about "Paper Empty", which makes me think it's supposed
 > to be a parallel port driver and hence probably corresponds to the
 > connector and cable that terminates in a Centronics connector - is this
 > true? 

Yup - bpp is "Bi-directional Parallel Port".

 > What about the lpvi,
 > does anyone have any clue?  (In particular, is it serial, parallel,
 > what?)  If anyone can get doco to me, I can try my hand at writing a
 > driver for it, whatever it is....

I believe it'll be difficult.  I think the SPARCprinter must have
been one of Sun's lowest moments.  It's been a while, but from memory
there was a kernel driver which actually interpreted postscript,
rasterized it, and dumped it out to the printer.  Think of the latest
generation of cheap-and-nasty Windows printers which speak GDI and use
the host's CPU to do rasterization and you'll have some idea of what
I mean.  To say, "the concept sucks," ranks as somewhat of an
understatement...

An ex employer of mine used to have one on an SS5.  Performance dropped
through the floor every time someone in the office tried to print
anything more complicated than plain text, and we had to hunt down 
Sun SPARCprinter driver CDs every time we upgraded the OS...

    - mark

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I tried an internal modem,                    newton@atdot.dotat.org
     but it hurt when I walked.                          Mark Newton
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