Printing Problems

Printing Problems

[Francisco Gomez]

I have a problem when I try to print in a matrix dot printer.
I am working with Mandrake 9.0 and a MS Cobol application running on the
dosemu.
If I send to print letters o numbers I have no problem, but if I send
special simbols, like control characters (End of Page, bold font) the
printer doesn't work.
Could you help me with this? Is it possible to send anything I want directly
to the LPT1 port without pass through the linux, like a dir > lpt1 in DOS?
Thank you.
Francisco Gomez.

Re: Printing Problems

[Grigory Batalov]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 739 bytes --]

On Wed, 4 Jun 2003 12:00:38 -0300
"Francisco Gomez" <fgomez@cqr.com.ar> wrote:

> I have a problem when I try to print in a matrix dot printer.
> I am working with Mandrake 9.0 and a MS Cobol application running on the
> dosemu.
> If I send to print letters o numbers I have no problem, but if I send
> special simbols, like control characters (End of Page, bold font) the
> printer doesn't work.
> Could you help me with this? Is it possible to send anything I want directly
> to the LPT1 port without pass through the linux, like a dir > lpt1 in DOS?

  Hi!
  It seems that print filter corrupts your output.
  Try attached patch for global.conf (it adds '-l' option
  to print command) and run dosemu like this:
  dosemu -F global.conf

[-- Attachment #2: global.conf.diff --]
[-- Type: text/plain, Size: 376 bytes --]

--- global.conf.orig	2003-01-15 12:37:15 +0300
+++ global.conf	2003-06-04 21:51:36 +0400
@@ -612,7 +612,7 @@
     vnet $_vnet
     if (strlen($_printer))
       foreach $xxx ($LIST_DELIM, $_printer)
-        $xxx = "'-P", $xxx, " %s'";
+        $xxx = "'-l -P", $xxx, " %s'";
         printer { options $$xxx  command "lpr"  timeout $_printer_timeout }
       done
     endif

Printing problems

[Samuele Catusian]

Hi all. I'm new to this ml, and first of all I want to thank the authors 
of dosemu and the entire community for the nice work done.

I'm using dosemu for several months and lately I had a problem with a
parallel printer which doesn't want to print at all.
There are no problems under GNU/Linux: I use lpr on Debian Woody and it
prints nicely. dosemu (version 1.0.2.1 packaged for Debian Woody,
package revision 7) runs MS-DOS 6.22 and the program I use just talks
to a dot-matrix printer which supports the IBM ProPrintIII protocol. I
already tuned-up many times this boxes under various hardware
configurations, and the printer never needed particular configurations
(i.e. the $_ports entry in dosemu.conf was always empty).
This time I played with the values in dosemu.conf, according to the BIOS
settings and the /proc/ioports entries about the parallel port, but
nothing happens.
I also played with the kernel (a vanilla 2.4.20 from kernel.org) parport
section many times, and it seems to be ok. I can print text files both
with lpr and echo-ing on /dev/lp0.
My current dosemu parameters are:

$_printer = "lp"	# which is properly configured in /etc/printcap
$_printer_timeout = (20)
$_ports = "device /dev/lp0 fast range 0x378 0x37f"

That's the output of # cat /proc/ioports | grep parport

0378-037a : parport0
037b-037f : parport0

They are perfectly matching the BIOS settings (the mobo is an Asus
P4B533, which I suppose have a standard BIOS). I tried to restrict the
range to 0x378-0x37a in the BIOS: /proc/ioports was ok, lpr worked fine,
but dosemu doesn't. 

It seems to be a dosemu (or perhaps MS-DOS) problem, because also doing
a "copy config.sys lpt1" at the dos prompt it doesn't print.

Of course, lpd is up and running.

Any help, hint or link would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

-- 
Samuele Catusian                                
http://studenti.ing.unipi.it/~s244797/          -o)      ,''`.
                                                 /\      : :' :
                                                _\_V     `. `'
Debian GNU/Linux: when you have to do other                `-
important things than fixing a system.