HP DeskWriter...

[Richard Michael Todd]

MARCELO at pucc.princeton.edu (MARCELO) writes:
>Ok here's my last hope of getting an original HP DeskWriter (no AppleTalk) 
>to work with AUX 2.0 It seems that no matter what I do I can't select the 
>printer port from the chooser to use with the HP (or IM II).

Yeah, I've had the same problem with my new ImageWriter II under A/UX.
What I did was just move the printer to the "modem" port and connect my
modem to the printer port.  Crude hack, but it works.  

Other helpful advice on using printers (specifically an ImageWriter II) with
A/UX: When you print something from the Mac environment, it apparently opens
the port the printer's on (in my case, /dev/modem) with O_EXCL, and never
closes it.  This means that if you print something from the Mac environment,
the lpd system will *not* be able to access that printer until you "Logout"
of the Mac environment and restart it again.  This is definitely very
bogus...

Other advice, for those of you using ImageWriters and the like to print, say,
TeX DVI files: The lpr documentation says that lpr will not accept binary
files (such as those produced by Nelson Beebe's DVIMAC driver, full of
graphics output for the ImageWriter).  This appears to be a lie; lpr accepts
them just fine.  However, the default printcap entry supplied for the Image-
Writer is apparently slightly erroneous; it causes 8-bit output to be munged.
Make sure the "os:..." field is "oc:..." instead--those bits need to be
cleared, not set.  This is probably true for the DeskWriter as well. 
-- 
Richard Todd   rmtodd at chinet.chi.il.us  or  rmtodd at uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu