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From: dbfunk@ICAEN.UIOWA.EDU (David B Funk)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Re: Need help with BSD4.3 printing through parallel port...
Message-ID: <8912010659.AA00706@icaen.uiowa.edu>
Date: 1 Dec 89 06:40:55 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: Iowa Computer Aided Engineering Network, University of Iowa
Lines: 25

In article <17339@netnews.upenn.edu> lau@kings.wharton.upenn.edu (Yan K. Lau) writes:
>
>Has anyone been able to get lpr printing to work with the
>parallel port on the Apollo SPE board?  I've setup /etc/printcap
>with /dev/pio.  Lpr queues jobs but nothing gets printed.  The
>jobs just sit in the queue.  Lpd is running.  I'm trying to hook
>up a HP Laserjet if this makes a difference.  Any ideas?
>

   You should be able to use Lpd to drive your printer if you can hook it
to the serial port. I'm not sure that it'll be worth the bother to
connect it to the parallel port. Yes SPE does provide a streams interface to
the parallel port, but you may also need to use a special "spe_$pio_set_mode"
call to configure the handshake options. This is OK within a new program
that you're writing, but an existing program like Lpd doesn't know
about this suff.
    It may not even be worth it from a speed stand point. I took one of
my prsvr HP LaserJet drivers and converted it from sio to pio output
as a test. I found that the SPE parallel I/O was about 20% faster than
the serial line at 9600 baud, and about 80% slower than the serial line
at 19200 baud. there was also lots more cpu overhead on the node when
driving the pio port. This was under sr9.7 with SPE v1.3, I've not tried
it under sr10.x.

Dave Funk