Date: Wed, 08 Dec 1999 18:59:21 -0800 From: "Ronald F. Guilmette" <rfg@monkeys.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Help! Simple printer problem becomes a major documentation beef. Message-ID: <3068.944708361@monkeys.com>
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Read this whole message. It's not about what you think its about. -------------------------------------- Here's my first-order problem: My printer doesn't work. I mean the printer *does* work. I know cuz it works just find on Linux. (The printer and the cable itself are just fine and dandy.) I have two systems here... one running Linux and another running FreeBSD. They are both dedicated to me and me alone. Because they are dedicated, I never bother with niceties like using the line printer spooler. My past experience tell me that its just too much of a hassle to THAT all get setup and configured properly, so I *never* bother with it. I just don't need it. I only print documents on rare occasions anyway. So I have gotten in the habit (on my old Linux system) of simply cat'ing whatever Postscript file I want to print to the parallel port device file (i.e. /dev/lp0 on Linux or /dev/lpt0 on FreeBSD). This *does* work just fine on Linux, in part because my Printer happens to be an HP Laserjet 5MP, which speaks Postscript. (If you want to print a Postscript file, experience shows that it really helps a lot if you have a Postscript- capable printer. :-) But cat'ing Postscript files directly to /dev/lpt0 on FreeBSD 3.3 has only worked for me intermittently, even at the best of times, and now it doesn't seem to be working at all, period. Earlier, a coupel fo weeks ago, I had convinced myself that I needed to do `lptcontrol -e' in order to make my printer work (on FreeBSD) but now, *even that* doesn't seem to do the trick, and now, when I cat files to /dev/lpt0, the printer just sits and stares at me. It doesn't even give any indication that it is even receiving any characters. No blinkin' lights, no pages printed, no nuttin'. Now granted, I've recently been diddling things inside that case of this system, e.g. swapping drives, putting in a new and bigger fan, etc., and *maybe* I somehow knocked loose a connector related to the parallel port or something, but that seems unlikely. It seems far more likely that I just don't know what the hell I'm doing when it comes to properly setting up and configuring a standard sort of PeeCee parallel port on FreeBSD. (I sure as hell don't understand exactly what the `lptcontrol -e' command actually does on, for example, the plain vanilla PeeCee hardware that I have.) OK, so the first thing I try to do is to educate myself, and I start reading man pages. That leads me to look closely at the config file that I used to generate the kernel I am using now. Specifically, I'm lookup at the entries relating to the things called `ppbus' and `ppc0' and `lpt0'. And I'm reading whatever little documentation of these things is present in the LINT file, which is to say not bloody much. So here is my first-order complaint: Please excuse my abundant ignorance, but just where the blazes are all of these extra little doo-dads that are tacked onto the end of the `device' lines documented anyway? I guess that I can figure out `irq NN' and `iomem 0xNNNNN' and `port 0xNNN' for myself, but what the heck is all of this other stuff? What does the `tty' modifer do? What exactly does `isa?' mean? What does the `disable' modifier do? (This stuff has always been rather opaque to me, but now, like it or not, I have to start understanding ALL of the specifics of kernel config file DEVICE lines.) Also, in the specific case of `device ppc0' what the heck does the `flags 0x40' modifier do?? The man page for `ppc' only describes meanings for bit flags 0x1 0x2 0x4 and 0x8. So where does the 0x40 come from and what the heck does it mean?? I scrounged around for awhile and tried to answer these questions for myself, but all I found was a 6-year-old paper titled ``Building 4.4BSD Kernels with Config' (which it would have been nice if the config(8) man page had given me the URL for, rather than making me search for it). Unfortunately, the kernel config file syntax that is described in that document *clearly* doesn't agree at all with the *current* config file syntax that is understood by the current FreeBSD kernel config(8) program. OK, so where is the *current* (FreeBSD) config file syntax documented? I know that I probably shouldn't but I just gotta say that this whole thing really does kinda tick me off. I mean I'm really not TRYING to be ignorant. I just am. And the available documentation (including the FreeBSD Handbook... which contains very little info about parallel ports, and even less *up-to-date* info about kernel configuration for parallel ports) isn't helping. I mean geeezzz! I only want to cat a bleedin' Postscript file to my bleedin' Postscript printer fer cryin' out loud! Why can't I just do that? Why does life have to be so complicated? Why can Linux, straight- out-of-the-box, do this but FreeBSD (with a mostly GENERIC kernel) can't? This *shouldn't* require a degree in rocket-science. P.S. In the example of the `device ppc0' line shown in the kernel LINT file, that line has the `tty' modifier on it, whereas in the GENERIC kernel config file... which I based *my* kernel config file on... that `tty' modifier is instead replaced with a `net' modifier. If this is what is causing all of my parallel port problems (because I have `net' rather than ``tty' on my ppc0 device line), then I gotta say that whoever picked the default of `net' for the GENERIC kernel maybe needs to think again about how parallel ports are most commonly used, i.e. NOT as networking devices. P.P.S. Let's suppose, just for the sake of argument, that there _is_ something wrong with the parallel port stuff inside of the case of this PeeCee... i.e. the one running FreeBSD. Other than the fact that I can't get stuff to print, how am I supposed to know that? Can the parallel port driver be configured to provide extra verbose kernel log debugging info to help me get to the bottom of this? Right now, it cer- tainly seems to be keeping a lot of potentially useful information to itself. For example, the ppc(4) man page says that the driver supports 4 different types of parallel port chips, but the boot-time messages it produces don't even say which type of parallel port chip it found to be present in my system! All it says at boot time is: ppc0 at 0x378 irq 7 flags 0x40 on isa ppc0: Generic chipset (EPP/NIBBLE) in COMPATIBLE mode lpt0: <generic printer> on ppbus 0 lpt0: Interrupt-driven port Not very chatty, is it? P.P.P.S. The FreeBSD handbook (at www.freebsd.org) says that *bi-directional* communication over the parallel port... which might be useful for debugging problems, *especially* with a Postscript printer... isn't supported ``yet''. Is that information still true? If so, when will bi-directional communica- tions over the parallel port be supported? I *really* would like to see any error messages that my printer might be trying to send back to the PeeCee. I mean who knows? Maybe the printer is sitting there desperately trying to say ``buy toner'' or something simple like that (but I don't think that it is). To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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