Date: Wed, 29 Mar 95 9:31:45 GMT From: James Vaughton <vaughton@tower-unix.city-poly.ac.uk> To: hstrong@eng2.uconn.edu (Hugh Strong), freebsd-questions (FreeBSD Questions List) <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org> Subject: Re: Slooww Printer Port Message-ID: <13944.9503290931@unixa.unixa.clp.ac.uk> In-Reply-To: <9503282201.AA06425@lurch>; from "Hugh Strong" at Mar 28, 95 5:01 pm
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|o|
|o|
|o| I seem to have a badly misbehaved parallel printer configuration. Under
|o| MS-DOG, output sent to my Deskjet 540 is printed soon after I copy it to
|o| lpt1:. Doing the equivalent
|o|
|o| cat filename.txt > /dev/lpt0
|o|
|o| under FreeBSD results the output finally being printed five to ten
|o| minutes later. All the while the printer blinks its "busy/power" status
|o| light as if something is being received. Printing a page of Postscript
|o| via Ghostscript takes several hours!
|o|
Boy I know that feeling... Right I posted a similar whinge a while back and
thanks to the many replies I recieved I sorted it out. It seems that it is
caused by sharing IRQ's. The simple solution is to us lptcontrol (or some
similar command) to set the printer device to being a polled one... eg.
lptcontrol -p /dev/lpt0
stick it in your rc.local and you should be sorted... The original answer to
this was posted by kleymeer@telalink.net (Chris Kleymeer) whose posting follows
Hope this helps,
Regards,
James V.
vaughton@unixa.lgu.ac.uk
----- ORIGINAL ANSWER TO PROBLEM -----
>Two quick problems, any suggestions folks ? ...
>
>1.) Printing from 2.0-RELEASE on a parallel printer on a P90 on device
> /dev/lpt0... When printing on this device the printer seems to print
> at a rate of somewhere between one and two characters per second. It
> should be said that it does print exactly the right thing just very,
> VERY, VERY slowly...
I ran into this problem which I resolved by using lptcontrol -p to switch
the printer to polled mode. I am unclear as to why this worked but my
parallel printer behaves as it should and so I'm happy.
Hope it works for you as well. Let me know and good luck!
chris @8~),
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