5 ms·

Basic Printing on OpenBSD

58 points by paedubucher 6y ago

tyingq 6y ago
Brings back memories of trying to get HPGL, PCL, or other non-postscript printers working with various flavors of Unix, lpd filter scripts, trying to get a form feed to spit out the paper, etc. Pretty sure there's an ugly Perl script of mine still doing this at a previous employer. My friends and I used to create a little mayhem sending bursts of form feeds to the DEC band printer in the lab when the teacher was near it. It would shoot out paper 5 feet or so.
- paedubucher 6y ago
  Reminds me a bit of the prank they played at AT&T by sending reverse form feeds to the printer, so that the victim had to insert the paper afresh.
  - cogburnd02 6y ago
    > reverse form feeds A form feed is 0x0C or ^L in ASCII. What the heck is a reverse form feed?
    - monadic2 6y ago
      E2 80 8F 0C
    - paedubucher 6y ago
      By the way, I read it here: https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/memoir.html https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/memoir.html Possibly it isn't written "reverse form feed", but something the like.
- znpy 6y ago
  It brought me memories of being 15 and hooking up a parallel (lpt) epson printer (a miniplotter really) to a netbsd machine, failing miserably and failing miserably. Text printed fine (mostly), anything else resulted in pages and pages of ascii characters (lol).
tehabe 6y ago
I remember lpd with some horror and was very glad when CUPS came along, made printing on Linux even easier than on Windows.
- paedubucher 6y ago
  I recently also suffered through some horrors with Cups. A new version was released, and old drivers didn't work together with it. And the manufacturer (Samsung, which sold its printer business to HP) didn't provide updated drivers, of course. So I'm happy to have some reliable facility to at least print PostScript. But Cups is fine if you get a proper and current driver for your printer.
  - tyingq 6y ago
    I imagine being a CUPS maintainer is not a good experience. They did something great, but probably only hear from end users when they are frustrated and not inclined to be civil.
    - projektfu 6y ago
      Doesn’t Apple maintain CUPS?
      - tyingq 6y ago
        Maybe? Wikipedia says "In March 2002, Apple Inc. adopted CUPS as the printing system for Mac OS X 10.2.[6] In February 2007, Apple Inc. hired chief developer Michael Sweet and purchased the CUPS source code.[7] On December 20, 2019 Michael Sweet announced on his blog that he had left Apple.[8]"
        projektfu 6y ago
        I hope they recognize it’s a little bit important. A lot of their users still produce paper.
accrual 6y ago
One small item that may make setup a little easier: # echo 'lpd_flags=""' >> /etc/rc.conf.local # /etc/rc.d/lpd restart Can be replaced with rcctl(8): # rcctl enable lpd # rcctl restart lpd
- paedubucher 6y ago
  Thanks for pointing this out! rcctl was added for OpenBSD 5.7, the manpage says. Absolute OpenBSD 2nd edition is older than that. I'll update accordingly!
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

58 points by paedubucher 6y ago

Brings back memories of trying to get HPGL, PCL, or other non-postscript printers working with various flavors of Unix, lpd filter scripts, trying to get a form feed to spit out the paper, etc. Pretty sure there's an ugly Perl script of mine still doing this at a previous employer. My friends and I used to create a little mayhem sending bursts of form feeds to the DEC band printer in the lab when the teacher was near it. It would shoot out paper 5 feet or so.

paedubucher 6y ago
Reminds me a bit of the prank they played at AT&T by sending reverse form feeds to the printer, so that the victim had to insert the paper afresh.
- cogburnd02 6y ago
  > reverse form feeds A form feed is 0x0C or ^L in ASCII. What the heck is a reverse form feed?
  - monadic2 6y ago
    E2 80 8F 0C
  - paedubucher 6y ago
    By the way, I read it here: https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/memoir.html https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/memoir.html Possibly it isn't written "reverse form feed", but something the like.
znpy 6y ago
It brought me memories of being 15 and hooking up a parallel (lpt) epson printer (a miniplotter really) to a netbsd machine, failing miserably and failing miserably. Text printed fine (mostly), anything else resulted in pages and pages of ascii characters (lol).

tehabe 6y ago

I remember lpd with some horror and was very glad when CUPS came along, made printing on Linux even easier than on Windows.

paedubucher 6y ago
I recently also suffered through some horrors with Cups. A new version was released, and old drivers didn't work together with it. And the manufacturer (Samsung, which sold its printer business to HP) didn't provide updated drivers, of course. So I'm happy to have some reliable facility to at least print PostScript. But Cups is fine if you get a proper and current driver for your printer.
- tyingq 6y ago
  I imagine being a CUPS maintainer is not a good experience. They did something great, but probably only hear from end users when they are frustrated and not inclined to be civil.
  - projektfu 6y ago
    Doesn’t Apple maintain CUPS?
    - tyingq 6y ago
      Maybe? Wikipedia says "In March 2002, Apple Inc. adopted CUPS as the printing system for Mac OS X 10.2.[6] In February 2007, Apple Inc. hired chief developer Michael Sweet and purchased the CUPS source code.[7] On December 20, 2019 Michael Sweet announced on his blog that he had left Apple.[8]"
      - projektfu 6y ago
        I hope they recognize it’s a little bit important. A lot of their users still produce paper.

accrual 6y ago

One small item that may make setup a little easier: # echo 'lpd_flags=""' >> /etc/rc.conf.local # /etc/rc.d/lpd restart Can be replaced with rcctl(8): # rcctl enable lpd # rcctl restart lpd

paedubucher 6y ago
Thanks for pointing this out! rcctl was added for OpenBSD 5.7, the manpage says. Absolute OpenBSD 2nd edition is older than that. I'll update accordingly!

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]