passthrough printing

passthrough printing

[Guillermo Gomez]

Hi all

I recently installed dosemu and implemented passthrough printing in
Windows machines using AnzioLit which costs something like 30US$ per
licence. Is there any free software to solve that in Windows machine?

My other question is, how can i do the same with a Linux box instead of
Windows (i'm looking for help to kick out Windows from 40 machines in
our company, thanks in advance).

Guillermo
(Caracas)

Re: passthrough printing

[Sergey Suleymanov]

>>>>> Guillermo Gomez writes:

 Guillermo> My other question is, how can i do the same with a Linux
 Guillermo> box instead of Windows (i'm looking for help to kick out
 Guillermo> Windows from 40 machines in our company, thanks in
 Guillermo> advance).

        Why passthrough? LPD is much more convenient. It works for
        Windows-NT/2000 as well. Not to mention linux.

-- 
  Sergey Suleymanov

Re: passthrough printing

[Guillermo Gomez]

Sergey

LPD would work perfectly and would be easy to configure if the IP
address of the remote printer were not changing (dial up links).

Besides that, some remote station are behind NAT (IP masquerade) routers
so ther are not easily reached.

Any suggestions ?

Guillermo

On Thu, 2002-11-21 at 02:21, Sergey Suleymanov wrote:
> >>>>> Guillermo Gomez writes:
> 
>  Guillermo> My other question is, how can i do the same with a Linux
>  Guillermo> box instead of Windows (i'm looking for help to kick out
>  Guillermo> Windows from 40 machines in our company, thanks in
>  Guillermo> advance).
> 
>         Why passthrough? LPD is much more convenient. It works for
>         Windows-NT/2000 as well. Not to mention linux.
> 
> -- 
>   Sergey Suleymanov
> 
> -
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-msdos" in
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Passthrough Printing

[Guillermo Gomez]

Ok, finally i made it through (thanks guys)

The pastrough printing is working for anyone considering it as an option
for the remote access to a DOS application with the actual source of
dosemu (dosemu-1.1.99.1])

Summary of my procedure:

1.- Download stable dosemu source code
2.- Download bin/zip freedos
3.- Rename freedos zip according INSTALL suggestions and moved
    into dosemu source tree
4.- Configure
5.- make
6.- make install

Well, in order to make the passthrough printing work i had to tweak
global.conf and because in this procedure global.conf get's compiled in
binary of dosemu, i follow:

7.- Get rid of bin/zip freedos file in the source tree of dosemu
    to avoid reinstalling freedos
8.- "Tweak global.conf in dosemu source tree (etc/global.conf)"
9.- make && make install
10.- Test 
11.- Goto 8 untill success :)

My successful lines in global.conf are:
(first locate the block then edit)
....
if (strlen($_printer))
  foreach $xxx ($LIST_DELIM, $_printer)
    ## $xxx = "'-P", $xxx, "'";
    ## printer { options $$xxx  command "lpr"  timeout $_printer_timeout
}
    printer { options '' command ' vtprint -fq ' timeout 1 }
  done
endif
....

Please note i'm using vtprint (there's also ansiprint) print filtering
for "printing escape sequence compliant terminals or emulators".

With this procedure the print effect from DOS application with default
settings (assuming your boot dir and dos is working) it's to send the
ASCII file with the correct escape sequence in order to print in a
locally attached printer to the terminal or emulator (in my case we are
using Anzio Lite in Windows machines as the clients).

Be carefull on what your print ! It's for ASCII text not for graphics ;)

Bart has wrote and email saying this feature will be easy to do with the
final release of 2.0 dosemu and that it can be used with the actual cvs
version but if u don't want get into this just because you want to waite
for the release, this procedure is a workaround for this particular
situation.

However, i have a problem, a network problem (think so):

1.- I made tests using telnet localhost, 30 printings in a row worked ok
with each print job as 19 pages long.Cool :)

2.- If i do the same but remotely, it looks like it starts to "random",
1 of 3, 2 of 4, with no pattern, some came out correctly and some not,
"without TCP errors", no TCP sequence problems, no TCP retransmission,
it just stops sending the data like TCP never got it.

I concluded it's a network problem but i don't know how to start to
debug it , i should start being sure the print job is being queued in
the TCP socket, how could i do that? where the info could being lost?

I sniffed the telnet traffic and there was no TCP errors, no
retransmission, nothing pointing me where the problem is.

Someone believes it could come from dosemu?

Any suggestions?

Regards

Guillermo



On Mon, 2003-12-08 at 22:23, Guillermo Gomez wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I compiled from source including global.conf modified as...
> 
> ...
> 
> if (strlen($_printer))
>     foreach $xxx ($LIST_DELIM, $_printer)
> ##   $xxx = "'-P", $xxx, "'";
> ##   printer { options $$xxx  command "lpr"  timeout $_printer_timeout }
>      printer { options '%s' command 'vtprint -fq' }
>    done
> endif
> 
> ...
> 
> But vtprint is reporting the following message
> 
> vtprint: Couldn't open %s for reading.-
> 
> What i'm doing wrong now?
> 
> Guillermo
> 
> 
> On Mon, 2003-12-08 at 20:20, Bart Oldeman wrote:
> > On 8 Dec 2003, Guillermo Gomez wrote:
> > 
> > > Well i found the problem is that the global.conf is "builtin" is taken
> > > precdence and my modified global.conf is not doing anything.
> > >
> > > I'm trying to use the -F option with no luck..How can i dump the
> > > "built-in" global.conf to tweak it using option -F.
> > 
> > Presently only by editing etc/global.conf in the source code and
> > recompiling. dosemu.bin in the bindist can be replaced by the one you
> > obtain that way.
> > 
> > > My installation is working ok without the -F option.
> > 
> > it's on my list to fix for 1.2.0. -F should work. The problem is here:
> > 
> > In file included from
> > dosemu/dosemu-cvs/dosemu-1.1.99.1/etc/global.conf:212
> > Error in : (line 212) parse error
> > Error in : (line 556) parse error
> > Error in : (line 556) expected 'emulated' or 'native'
> > 3 error(s) detected while parsing the configuration-file
> > 
> > by the way, because your problem came up in different variations before
> > the CVS version (and 1.2.0-final when released) allow you to do what you
> > want in dosemu.conf or ~/.dosemurc:
> > 
> > # list of (/etc/printcap) printer names to appear as LPT1, LPT2, LPT3
> > # (not all are needed, empty for none). Default: "lp"
> > 
> > # $_printer = "lp"
> > 
> > # Print command to use. Default: "lpr", for "lpr -P printername".
> > # Sometimes (with CUPS) "lpr -l" is necessary.
> > 
> > # $_printer_command = "lpr"
> > 
> > Bart
> > 
> > [snip]
> > 
> 
> -
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