MacOS print drivers under A/UX

[Keith Vaughn]

A/UX 1.1 apparently supports the print manager - is comes with the chooser
DA.  However, by default, the image writer (or imagewriter II) driver was
not included with the initial release.  Thus, I copied one from my MAC/OS
partition to /usr/lib/mac (A/UX equivalent of the System folder), but chooser
gave me problems when I tried to select it claiming the AppleTalk was always
active.  Also, programs would either hang or core dump if I tried to
subsequently print anything using the print manager.

My hypothesis is that print drivers cannot support the serial ports directly
since these devices are also installed as A/UX kernal device drivers - thus
the need for an extra NU-Bus card if you want to run AppleTalk.  However,
I cannot see any reason why Apple cannot supply a print manager driver that
will convert text or PICT to image writer II format and then pipe the output
directly into lp (the UNIX line printer spooler) and bypass the actual hardware.
This way UNIX and Mac style printing could co-exist.

Is anyone aware of anybody who has solved this problem or is working on a
similar driver?  Without a solution, all my Mac tools that run under A/UX
(MacPaint, MacDraw, WingZ, etc.) are worthless without hardcopy.