Hi,

Since upgrading from VOY 5328 to VOY 5825 I've been having problems
with printing (actually, the problem *might* have been there in 5328
... I've not done much printing since 4740).

Despite much hair-pulling and printcap-fiddling I've not managed to
make any headway, and I'm beginning to come to the conclusion that
the problem's something to do with the parallel port driver.

Some system details: RPC700 SA; old, but healthy HP Deskjet+ on the
                     parallel port.

The symptoms are:

1. On startup I get a syslogd notice-level message along the lines of,
     
     '... /netbsd: printer offline ...'
     
   whether the printer is on or off. Note, this is *not* the message
   that's reported during the hardware probe: it appears just after
   syslogd starts up. This initially caused some puzzlement, because
   the message was appearing part way through the 'starting RPC
   daemons' section of the boot log.

2. I don't get any 'printer out of paper' console messages any more.

3. Whenever I start two print jobs, the printer seems to be being
   reset as soon as the second job comes to the top of the print
   queue. At that point most of the first job is still in the printers
   buffer, and gets unceremoniously dumped when the printer is reset,
   to be replaced by the second.
   
As I said, I've tried just about every combination of printcap
settings I can think of, read all the FAQs and gone through the
printer manual with a fine-tooth comb. The only thing which seems to
account for all of 1, 2 and 3 is that the parallel port driver is
looking at the wrong bits for messages coming back from the printer,
and fiddling with the reset bit (on pin 31) when it shouldn't.

If anyone can help with this prob I'd be very grateful. OTOH I'm about
to start tracking current, so if anyone can give me pointers to the
relevant sources, I might have a go at fixing it myself.

Incidentally, am I right in thinking that the only port-arm32 patch
that I need these days is csc.o for my Cumana SCSI II card?

Cheers,


Miles

-- 
Miles Sabin                               mailto:miles@mistral.co.uk
Cathexis                                  voice  01273 732338
                                          letter 10 Pembroke Gardens
                                                 Brighton, BN3 5DY