espen@well.sf.ca.us (Peter Espen) (08/29/90)
I've been having problems getting my Imagewriter to work in A/UX 2.0. No matter what I do, I can't get the chooser to believe that appletalk is inactive, and so it won't let me select that printer port for the Imagwriter. I know that someone else has been having the same problem and posting it to comp.unix.aux. I finally gave up on getting the chooser to allow me to select the printer port for the Imagwriter, and I switched my modem to the printer port and my Imagewriter to the modem port and did all the necessary device driver juggling for the system to look for these things on the new ports. The modem works just great on the printer port, but the system is having problems printing to the Imagwriter on the modem port. Even though the chooser lets me select the modem port for the Imagewriter, my applications in Multifinder under A/UX are getting hung in the "printing....type clover and . to cancel" . I have gotten MS Word to print once or twice correctly with this set-up, but it is highly erratic and unreliable. I spoke with Apple A/UX tech support about this yesterday. The A/UX tech support people have been real helpful and even though I don't always get the correct answer or solution from them on the first call, I always get things straightened out after just a couple of calls. Antonio at A/UX tech support has been especially helpful and is a VERY knowledgable expert on A/UX. Anyway, the bottom line regarding my problem according to A/UX tech support is that A/UX has a known problem working with an Imagwriter at all. Apparently A/UX works ok with appletalk devices, but just doesn't like to have a serial printer. A/UX tech support told me that they are working on a fix for this problem and a patch would be posted to their A/UX support system at some unspecified future date. If anyone has been successful in getting a serial printer to work correctly with Mac Multifinder applications running under the A/UX finder, please post any info here or send me some details via e-mail. It's a major set back to not be able to print at all from my Mac applications! Anyone for A/UX tech support listening? Any idea when this problem will be fixed?? Help! Peter Espen espen@well
rmtodd@uokmax.uucp (Richard Michael Todd) (08/30/90)
espen@well.sf.ca.us (Peter Espen) writes: >in A/UX 2.0. No matter what I do, I can't get the chooser >to believe that appletalk is inactive, and so it won't let me >select that printer port for the Imagwriter. I know that someone >else has been having the same problem and posting it to >comp.unix.aux. I finally gave up on getting the chooser to Yep. I have the same problem. Like you, I moved the ImageWriter to the modem port and moved the modem to the printer port. >under A/UX are getting hung in the "printing....type clover >and . to cancel" . I have gotten MS Word to print once or twice >correctly with this set-up, but it is highly erratic and unreliable. Well, I don't use Mickeysoft Word (it being against my religion to format text with anything except troff or TeX :-), but I've been seeing some of the same problems with Maple. Sometimes it prints real quickly, other times it prints a few lines of the graph and then hangs for like 10-20 *minutes* before eventually finishing. Alas, it's hard to say whether this is the fault of Maple or of the A/UX Mac-emulation environment, as I really don't use any other MacOS software... There's another nasty feature of the current printer software: it apparently opens the serial device (/dev/tty0) with O_EXCL set and never closes it after your file has finished printing. This means that once you print a file from the MacOS environment you will *not* be able to access the printer from the Unix side (with lpr/lpd) until you Logout of the MacOS emulator and log back in again. Tacky. I *think* I've come up with a workaround; it involves moving the real /dev/tty0 "out of the way" of the MacOS emulator and putting in its place a slave pseudo-tty, and having a process to read from the master side of the pty and send the output to lpr, so that your Mac-style printing will look like just another Unix job. I'm still working on the software to do this, but I whipped up a quick program to run the master pty side of things and it seemed to work, and printing from the Mac side to a file instead of to the printer is a whole lot faster :-). Print spooling, what a concept... I'll post the software that does this when I've done some more work on it, probably sometime in the next few weeks. -- Richard Todd rmtodd@chinet.chi.il.us rmtodd@servalan.UUCP "MSDOS is a Neanderthal operating system" - Henry Spencer