Printer on 4D/20

Darrell Davis davis at blake.acs.washington.edu
Fri Jun 2 06:30:16 AEST 1989


We recently bought a NEC LC890 PostScript laser printer to use on
a group of three Personal Iris's.  I am having a fair bit of trouble
getting it to work.  I did call the SGI hotline and went through the
configuration, all indications are that it should be printing, but isn't.
I used the procedure in the laser printer documentation, the command 
mkPS, etc.
i have several questions:

The first is has anyone put one of these printers on the serial interface/
printspooler?  I can't see why this device should be any different than an
Apple LaserWriter, that is the idea isn't it.  I am using a full 9pin to 25pin 
interface cable.  The laser printer is configured for PostScript Batch, serial 
interface, 9600 baud.

The other question I have is whether anyone has configured a laser writer/NEC
printer to use the parallel port, i.e. /dev/plp.  I have printed out PS files
using cat file.ps > /dev/plp.  It would be nice to config a network of Iris's
to use the the parallel interface.  The simple-minded approach of substituting
plp for ttyd2 in the configuration sequence doesn't seem to be acceptable. 

I must be doing something dumb because the configuration protocol looks so easy.

Thanks in advance.

-Darrell Davis



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