Subject: Re: bpp and lpd troubles (revisited?)
To: John D. Baker <jdbaker@mylinuxisp.com>
From: Greg A. Woods <woods@weird.com>
List: port-sparc
Date: 04/13/2003 16:29:42
[ On Thursday, April 3, 2003 at 12:53:11 (-0600), John D. Baker wrote: ]
> Subject: bpp and lpd troubles (revisited?)
>
> There was a brief thread a few months back about problems with the
> Sun parallel port (bpp) and lpd printing.
> 
> I've run into similar problems trying to use my Epson Stylus Color
> 880 on a SPARCstation 5.  lpd works fine for plain ASCII text, but
> has trouble with raw graphics data (either sent to my "raw" printer
> or generated via 'magicfilter' as my input filter).

I've recently tried connecting a similar printer (stc800) to the SS-20
currently on my desktop and yesterday finally got around to building
GhostScript-nox11 and tried sending the output of the "uniprint" GS
driver to the printer (with "cat gs.out > /dev/bpp0").

It starts out OK, printing as much as an inch or so of a photo, for
example, then spews some random bits and spits out the page.  What it
does next seems random.  Once it continued printing the photo on the
next page, and if the media was transparencies I could have lined them
up and it would have been a near perfect print.  Another time it just
spewed some random bits of random color on a line or a few lines of the
next page, and the next, and the next, and so on until I powered off the
printer.

Unfortunately the power cycling of the printer triggered a "Watchdog
Reset" and "go" didn't resume the kernel (OF claimed there was no active
program to resume) so I'm now very reluctant to experiment further until
I get around to booting another SS to play with.

It would be interesting to hear from people with experience using
SunOS-5.x and similar graphics printers on their parallel ports....

It would also be interesting to hear from anyone with a similar printer
connected to a Magma SP board.

Now I _really_ wish my printer was an 800N (i.e. a model with the
built-in Ethernet interface).

> If I convert the input file to printer graphics data manually and send
> it to the raw printer, it doesn't hang, but it doesn't print correctly
> either (acts like extra line/form feeds inserted between rows of data).
> 
> 'cat'ing the printer graphics data directly to the parallel port works
> fine, but at that point 'print services' is out of the loop.

If you mean by "send it to the raw printer" that you use "lpr/lpd" then
I think you're just seeing anomalous behaviour.  You'll no doubt see
similar problems with "cat" if you send enough data (the smallest of my
GS output files was 1.25MB).  I seriously doubt the problem is with
"lpd", especially since it had nothing to do with my seeing exactly the
same kinds of problems -- I have never even started it running on this
system.

I'm now reasonably certain the problem is either with the hardware, or
with the driver (or with the driver not compensating for hardware
deficiencies to the same degree Sun's bpp(7D) driver might).

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;            <g.a.woods@ieee.org>;           <woods@robohack.ca>
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