ccc_ldo@waikato.ac.nz (Lawrence D'Oliveiro, Waikato University) (09/04/90)
You know how it is--you share a LaserWriter among a group of Mac users, and you have to make sure they all have the same version of the LaserWriter and Laser Prep files. Otherwise, you get that dreaded message "The LaserWriter has been initialized with an incompatible version of the Laser Prep software", with the option to reset the printer. At the recent Australian Developer Conference, somebody from MacDTS mentioned to me that, beginning with System 7.0, this old version shuffle is supposed to become a thing of the past: Laser Prep no longer loads permanently, or is no longer incompatible with a different version that is permanently-loaded. He said that might even be true of the LaserWriter 6.0 driver. Not only that, but at last year's conference, we were told that the LaserWriter 6.0 driver would be able to coexist with people printing from System 7 (at that point the new print architecture still looked like it would be part of 7.0). Well, I tried it a few weeks ago, and none of this is true. First, I switched to 6.0.1 (we normally use 5.2), and tried to print something. I got the reset message, clicked OK, waited for the printer to reset, and got my printout with no trouble. I then restarted with System 7.0a9 and tried to print something. *Again* the message came up (indicating an incompatibility between the 6.0.1 and 7.0a9 driver), and again I got my printout OK after the printer had gone through its reset sequence. I then switched back to System 6.0.5 and LaserWriter 6.0.1, and tried printing something. This produced the reset message for the *third* time, indicating that the 7.0a9 driver had loaded its Laser Prep permanently into the printer. Conclusion: I'm glad I didn't get our users to switch wholesale from 5.2 to 6.0/6.0.1. At least we'll have skipped *one* step of the version shuffle... So what gives? Can someone from Apple give us the story on this? I'd appreciate it. Lawrence D'Oliveiro fone: +64-71-562-889 Computer Services Dept fax: +64-71-384-066 University of Waikato electric mail: ldo@waikato.ac.nz Hamilton, New Zealand 37^ 47' 26" S, 175^ 19' 7" E, GMT+12:00 Make a sentence with "dervish": "Dervish is in dervrying-pan."