flash@lehi3b15.csee.lehigh.edu (Stephen Corbesero) (06/08/90)
I have just upgraded some Sun workstataions, and a NEC QMS-890 (postscript) laser printer that used to work fine has redeveloped buffering problems. This was a difficult printer to connect in the first place, as we ended up conneting it via a serial port on the Sun into a a serial<>parallel converter into the parallel port on the printer. This configuration had been working quite well until I upgraded. I'd like to get this printer working again, and have two paths. 1. Come up with a working printcap. The xon/xoff flow control (which the converter was generating) is not being handled by th workstation, even though I tried a variety of settings in /etc/printcap. 2. I have a Sun-3/80, which has a centronics parallel port, that is supposedly compatible with a wide varity of PC printers, according to the sparse documentation in the hardware overview. Hooking up a parallel dot matrix printer to this port produced very discouraging results. When I cat-ed a file to /dev/pp0, the command timed-out with an write error on the port, BUT the first character did get printed after that. If there a known problem with the pp0 hardware and/or software driver? Thanks for any help, thoughts, or suggestions.