Hi DU Admins
This is a very late summary of my question about tcp printing
to a Digital ln17ps. I've been busy with other things
and needed more time to experiment with the printer.
Thanks to Burch Seymour, Donald Bovee and Toni Harbaugh-Blackford
who answered my questions.
It looks like tcp printing can't be made to work for this
printer. I've gone back to running it as a remote printer
which does work but causes other problems.
In order to get remote printing to work and also support
text, postscript and duplex from the same queue I had to create
two printcap entries: one that the users print to and one that
actually sends the job to the printer.
The problem with this is that when users check the queue and
see nothing in it they assume their job has been printed but
it could still be waiting in the "real" queue with a lot of
large jobs ahead of it.
WARNING: Anyone who's busy should stop reading here because I'm
about to launch into a long winded complaint.
This seems like a good printer. We've already printed several
theses with lots of complex diagrams on it: the quality and
speed of the prints were excellent and the duplex option worked
perfectly.
However we've had problems with the NIC for this printer
and with a lack of mutual support between the printer and
Digital Unix. One of the reasons we bought this printer is
that we expected good compatibility between a Digital printer
and Digital Unix. Not so unfortunately. (The printer
is made by Xerox but the NIC seems to be Digital's).
Firstly the NIC reports to the Mac driver (and probably to the
Windows drivers as well although I haven't tested them) that
the printer has only 3.5MB of free memory when the printer
actually has 22MB of RAM. We added a 16 MB memory module to
the base 6 MB so that we could print pages with complex
diagrams in duplex mode. Because the NIC reports such a
low figure for free RAM the driver insists on turning off
page protection which causes lots of "page too complex" errors.
Swapping the two memory modules made no difference to
the amount of free RAM reported. The printer itself
reports the correct amount of RAM and with page protection
forced on it can handle pages of any complexity we've
been able to throw at it.
Secondly there's no support for this printer in versions of
Digital Unix prior to 4.0D. I lifted the print filters off the
4.0D CD and they work fine under 4.0C but they support only a
few of the printer's capabilities. Apparently better support
is coming in DU 5.0 but in the meantime if we want to use
all of the printer's features we have to print to it from a
Mac or a PC.
Thirdly although this is a Digital printer the installation
software for Unix that comes with the NIC doesn't support
Digital Unix properly. There are binaries on the disk for
several flavours of Unix but not for Digital Unix. These
can be compiled from the sources however.
If you install lpd printing using the "enstall" script that
comes with the NIC it installs the log file (lf: entry)
and the spool directory (sd: entry) in the wrong places -
that is not in the standard places for Digital Unix.
The NIC installation disk provides a utility called rprint
which is supposed to work like tcp printing by allowing
you to print to a remote printer and use filters. While
this works okay as installed it requires separate queues for
text and postscript and has no support for other options such
as duplex printing.
With some experimentation I might be able to get the other
options to work and maybe even a single queue for text and
postscript but I don't have time at present. I've already
spent more time on this printer than I can afford.
Ian
_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/
_/ Ian Mortimer _/
_/ mortimer_at_physics.uq.edu.au ,-_|\ Department of Physics _/
_/ Tel: +61 7 3365 3436 / *\ University of Queensland _/
_/ Fax: +61 7 3365 1242 \_,-._/ St. Lucia, Brisbane _/
_/ v Queensland, Australia 4072 _/
_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/_/
Disclaimer: Speaking only for myself.
Received on Tue Apr 21 1998 - 00:23:27 NZST