Oh joy! printing works!

Testing Jaunty Puppy, I've got my Ntavo thinstation PC (256MB RAM, 400MHz fanless CPU, no hard drive, boots off CF card) running. This PC has a parallel port so I was able to plug in my old Epson LX800 dot-matrix printer.

I copied the latest '463' build of Jaunty pup to the CF card, booted the Ntavo, and hey, printing finally works!!!

I don't know about Foomatic though. I'm away from home right now and only have the Epson printer with me, and tested the Gutenprint generic Epson 9-pin driver.

This has made my day.

The fixes that I put into the package templates in Woof have only been tested in the Ubuntu Jaunty build, but should apply just as well to the Debian Lenny build, and hopefully even to the others.

Ah, my trusty old Epson dot matrix. They made 'em tough then. I don't recall when I bought it, it goes back into the mists of time. It has been gathering dust in a heap of other old gear for the last 10 - 12 years. The ribbon still gives a very (very) faint image. Gee, I wonder if ribbons are still available? or re-inkers?

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Comments

Dot matrix printer and ribbon


Print Happy
Username: lobster
"[i]This has made my day[/i] I am virtually paperless but many still need the essential print out. Very good news for them. My first printer took 5 minutes per page of text - no graphics - it used a daisy wheel - literally 5 minutes. :worried: Have a great day :happy:

Old DM printers and others.
Username: Sage
"You can re-ink with ordinary endorsing ink available from any stationary supplier. If you dropper it onto the edge of the (fabric only)ribbon coil from both sides and leave it for a week, it'll be good as new. The importance of getting an FX80 driver to work is profound. Many, many succeeding printers will also give a basic result, including old laser and early inkjet machines. Don't expect miracles, but drafting code, even threating letters to errant satellite ISP s can be adequate to get your message across.

Jaunty Puppy
Username: Leon
"Barry, I'm sorry to mention this here but it is as fundamental as printing. I tried Jaunty Puppy 4.61 and it looks promising. The new libfreetype.so.6.3.20 with bytecode interpreter enabled gives on my Sony LCD monitor the best font rendering so far. The problem that still remain unsolved is a Internet connection. I tried all the previous Woof releases as well as the latest Jaunty Puppy (upup-461.iso) and I still can't establish a Internet connection nor by using rp-pppoe for ADSL, nor by using my Manhattan USB Modem for analogue phone line. It seems that both: 1. Manhattan USB Modem PupDial [i]GOOD!Modem selected!Device interface: /dev/ttyACM0[/i] and 2. Network card [i]Puppy Network Wizard eth0, Ethernet via-rhine, pci: VIA Technologies, VT6105/VT610S Rhine-III 'Puppy was able to find a live network'[/i] are properly recognized but none of them can't establish Internet connection. I even compiled and installed PPPoE Version 3.10 in Jaunty Puppy 4.61 but with no success. When I compiled and installed PPPoE Version 3.10 in Puppy 4.12 it works well. I downloaded the source for the latest RP-PPPoE Version 3.10 from here: http://www.roaringpenguin.com/files/download/rp-pppoe-3.10.tar.gz So, if you'll have a chance please check rp-pppoe and PupDial.

HardInfo 0.5.1
Username: happypuppy
"HardInfo 0.5.1 released: http://wiki.hardinfo.org/Downloads - Reveals even more system info - Comes with better benchmarks

OLD printer RIbbon
Username: Greg
"Not a perfect solution, but spray your old ribbon with WD40... two solutions in one, lubricates the print head and restores the ink.. assuming the fabric is still good. Spin the take up side to be sure you get penetration to the entire ribbon, as the take up is a stuffer box. You can hook it up to a drill if you wish. Old trick :) Don't over spray... Let the ribbon sit... to penetrate the entire ribbon.

Re: missing CUPS files
Username: BarryK
"Mostly the content of the 'backend' directory is the same as 'backend-available' directory. I'm away from home and don't have access to my PC with Ubuntu Intrepid installed, then I can check -- I recall that it had one or two extra files in 'backend' that weren't in 'backend-available' -- after I get home I'll check that out. Anyway, just choosing one file, backend/ipp, a search at packages.ubuntu.com shows that it is only in one package, 'cups'. And the filelist shows only one occurrence of that file: /usr/lib/cups/backend-available/ipp So, probably Ubuntu has something else at runtime that copied the contents of 'backend-available' to 'backend'.

Tags: woof