Hi all,
wow, I've got a lot of replies - thank you:
Steve Butterfield <steve.butterfield@pcs.co.uk>
Tim Evans <tkevans@eplrx7.es.dupont.com>
Matthew Stier <Matthew.Stier@tddny.fujitsu.com>
Benjamin Cline <benji@hnt.com>
Jim Harmon <jharmon@telecnnct.com>
Harald Fricke <Fricke.Harald@mh-hannover.de>
Don Williams <don.williams@research.natpower.co.uk>
Stephen Johnston <sj@wolfson.co.uk>
Chenthil Kumar <chenthil@mtcts1.mt.lucent.com>
Bismark Espinoza <bismark@alta.Jpl.Nasa.Gov>
James Ashton <James.Ashton@syseng.anu.edu.au>
Adrian Cole <Adrian.Cole@ausgate.cv.com>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
The original question was:
> Hi Sun Managers,
>
> someone in our institute found some SPARCstations IPX (sun4c) and also
> some SPARCprinters (Model QA-6) and now some people want to run them
> together. The IPX has the special SBus printer card.
>
> The first thing I did was to install Solaris 2.5 on the machine and
> contrary to my expectation the machine can handle this quite well. It is
> not that slow I expected.
>
> Then I installed the printer using admintool. As printer port I defined
> the serial port ttya. It seems, that the printer queue was set up
> correctly - but the system does not communicate with the printer. The OS
> behaves like there is a printer, but nothing goes out.
>
> Is it possible, that Solaris 2.5 does not support the SBus card?
> Do I need a special software to configure the SBus card?
>
> Does anybody have experience with this hardware and software
> combination? I would be happy for any clue.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
First of all, I havn't run it yet - but with the information I got from
the repliers I've got the idea what to do. I have also called our Sun
dealer, which called Sun Microsystems directly, which pointed me to the
web.
The following are the Information I've got from all of them as summary:
The princip:
The SPARCprinter is connected to a special video port on the SBUS board.
It is a "dumb" printer, that relies on a PostScript interpreter running
on the host system and a special (well, it's not particularly special,
but it isn't a standard part of SunOS or Solaris) device driver to talk
to the printers SBus card. Sun's own solution is called NeWSprint,
SunPics' software for printing on Sun workstations (for Solaris version
2.5B).
The card actually contains the printer's frame buffer and it drives the
printer's laser more or less directly via a video rate signal over the
cable.
The hadicap:
Sun no longer sells the software (known within Sun as EndOfLife or
"EOL") in mid-1995, when Sun introduced its SPARCprinter E series of
network printers. Now, Sun retrieves themselves completely from the
printer market.
The solution:
Thrid party product! There is a program called PostShop from Vividata
(http://www.vividata.com). It costs for the SPARCprinter $495.00 per
licence Fee per CRI (Concurrent Runnable Instance), $129.00 for Annual
Maintenance (optional, per unit, per year), $65.00 for CD Media and
Hardcopy Documentation (optional).
In addition:
Vividata PostShop[tm] supports printing to the original Sun SparcPrinter
through the lpvi driver. There is a catch, you have to have an lpvi
driver. All Sun customers with NeWSPrinters originally must have had
lpvi on their systems. lpvi was included with NeWSPrint, the original
software for SparcPrinters.As far as we know, the newest lpvi driver is
available from the sunsolve website. So it would appear that in general
users and sysadmins must either get the driver from their own support
groups or directly from Sun. The majority of Vividata's customers have
access to Sun contract support.
The alternative:
Alternatively, you can use Ghostscript to drive the SPARCprinter, but
you still need the lpvi header file and kernel driver from the NeWSprint
software to make it work.
What we are going to do is, to try the PostShop software - Vividata
offers as well a free 30-day "Try and Buy" evaluation of any of their
products.
Again, thanks to everybody who helped.
Regards,
Justus Brunke
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(o o)
---------------------------oOO--(_)--OOo--------------------------
Justus Brunke
Joint Research Centre of the European Communities
Environment Institute, TAS, Informatics Support (TP 280)
21020 ISPRA (VA), ITALY
Tel.:(+39)0332/78-5431
Email: justus.brunke@jrc.it
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:11:59 CDT