*BSD News Article 34266


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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!msuinfo!agate!soda.CSUA.Berkeley.EDU!tmonroe
From: tmonroe@soda.CSUA.Berkeley.EDU ()
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Re: Printing under FreeBSD 1.5.1.1
Date: 13 Aug 1994 21:16:53 GMT
Organization: Computer Science Undergraduate Association, UC Berkeley
Lines: 27
Message-ID: <32jd85$rct@agate.berkeley.edu>
References: <32hijhINNgab@gambier.ugrad.cs.ubc.ca>
NNTP-Posting-Host: soda.csua.berkeley.edu

In article <32hijhINNgab@gambier.ugrad.cs.ubc.ca>,
Markus Meister <h5h1@rick.cs.ubc.ca> wrote:

>Both ways it prints, but extremely slowly.. the printer only prints a few
>characters at a time... is this because my computer isn't very fast
>(a DX2-66, as opposed to a real unix workstation), and FreeBSD just doesn't
>give the printing a lot of attention, or is something set up wrong?

To take something from the _Unix_System_Administrator's_Handbook by
Nemeth, Snyder, and Seebass:

"The printing facilities provided by BSD are somewhat mediocre.  They
allow only simple operations, are hard to maintain, and sometimes just
plain don't work right.  The saving grace of the BSD printing model is
that it extends well to large networks, allowing many computers to
share printers."

						page 174

You can probably tell from this that printing under any BSD-derived OS
is going to be a pain.  Ask me, I know.  My printer, an HP DeskJet
500, won't work properly at all so I have given up on trying to print
under BSD.  If I could somehow change LF to CR-LF, it MIGHT actually
work right when I cat > /dev/lpt0.  Now, when it gets to the 80th
column, it gets confused and stops.  Maybe I should go back to a daisy
wheel...