Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!ames!sun-barr!cs.utexas.edu!husc6!ogccse!blake!davis
From: davis@blake.acs.washington.edu (Darrell Davis)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi
Subject: Printer on 4D/20
Message-ID: <2249@blake.acs.washington.edu>
Date: 1 Jun 89 20:30:16 GMT
Reply-To: davis@blake.UUCP (Darrell Davis)
Distribution: usa
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle
Lines: 25

We recently bought a NEC LC890 PostScript laser printer to use on
a group of three Personal Iris's.  I am having a fair bit of trouble
getting it to work.  I did call the SGI hotline and went through the
configuration, all indications are that it should be printing, but isn't.
I used the procedure in the laser printer documentation, the command 
mkPS, etc.
i have several questions:

The first is has anyone put one of these printers on the serial interface/
printspooler?  I can't see why this device should be any different than an
Apple LaserWriter, that is the idea isn't it.  I am using a full 9pin to 25pin 
interface cable.  The laser printer is configured for PostScript Batch, serial 
interface, 9600 baud.

The other question I have is whether anyone has configured a laser writer/NEC
printer to use the parallel port, i.e. /dev/plp.  I have printed out PS files
using cat file.ps > /dev/plp.  It would be nice to config a network of Iris's
to use the the parallel interface.  The simple-minded approach of substituting
plp for ttyd2 in the configuration sequence doesn't seem to be acceptable. 

I must be doing something dumb because the configuration protocol looks so easy.

Thanks in advance.

-Darrell Davis