This sounds like the exact same problem I'm having with my Epson Stylus
740 and LC475 - as you say, the Stylus power switch becomes like a stop/go
button for NetBSD. I asked this question a couple of times over the last
couple of months on this mailing list, and haven't been able to get a reply.
I assume this is because on one else has managed to get these printers working
either.

I think that the conclusion has to be that you can't print to the newer
Epson printers with NetBSD on an old Mac. (Apparently you can use a Stylus
Pro, because it autobauds and will work at slower rates.) For me though, I
might as well wipe my NetBSD partition, since I can't really do anything
useful without a printer.

It's a pity, because I can confirm that the 740 does work from the Mac side,
so it is not a hardware limitation. Unfortunately, I don't have the time or
in-depth knowledge to do whatever is necessary to the NetBSD serial driver.

One possibly interesting thing is that if I turn the printer on while MacOS
is up, while the printer is doing its funky cleaning routine, the mac locks
up just as NetBSD does. My guess is that the printer is flooding the mac
with interrupts, perhaps caused by the printer generating a clock signal on
the serial port, or sending data. I did wonder if I had to set an external
clock on the serial port in NetBSD, but haven't been able to find out how I
might go about this, or what values to use.

The irony is that I've done the Ghostscript bit before (on an SGI Indy), so
I'm sure I could do the 'hard bit' easily!

Ian

On Mon, May 07, 2001 at 08:14:41PM -0700, Martin Joseph wrote:
> Now, it seems like the system is kinda workin' with the lp command
> spawning a gs daemon and trying to print...  But if the Stylus color 800
> is on, it locks the entire system(IIci or P475).
> 
> The Stylus power switch becomes like a stop/go button for netbsd.