Has anyone used a dot-matrix printer in Haiku using a USB/parallel-port adaptor?
Thanks
In the old days, we’d just send the document to the line printer port (/dev/lp0, etc). The line printer driver was a pretty skeletal thing - but it did do some data buffering, so it would halt the data going into the printer when the printer buffer was full, then continue, etc. Unfortunately, I don’t think Haiku has a line printer driver yet. I did a little checking, and found that it does have a serial-usb driver. Theoretically, you could just send your file (assuming you wanted just text mode printing) to the serial-usb port. Some printers will print OK without any kind of upfront character sequences. Others (Epson) require special characters. When you plug your serial-usb printer into your Haiku machine - you should see the device pseudo file appear in /dev. If you just send your data file to the character device, it will use default serial parameters (probably something like 115k baud, 8 bits, 1 stop bit, etc). You could play around with the settings or use SANE to reconfigure. Sorry I have no old printer lying around that I can test for you. Wish I did.
I know about the serial-usb driver because of this Haiku ticket:
KP3 - as in Puerto Rico?
Hi,
Thanks for the info! Are you a ham radio operator? Yep, I live in Puerto Rico but in NY until January. Came up mainly to do some work for my parents, and also to upgrade a radio station. In fact, the post I made about dot-matrix printers is regarding the station, and actually all BeOS/Haiku posts on the various forums. The station uses a BeOS machine running TuneTracker and has worked great the last eight years. Want to switch to Haiku/Tunetracker soon.
We use a dot-matrix printer because they are reliable and don’t have issues with dried up ink cartridges, and they are form-feed so no out-of-paper problems. It’s used for logging the Emergency Alert System alerts. Related to that, I’m trying to get BeOS to also log the same alerts via serial-port as a backup, in case there’s a paper jam, etc. It’s turned out to be harder than I thought, if not impossible, since I’m not a programmer; SerialConnect receives the ASCII data just fine, but it doesn’t have an option to automatically write new text into a log file, so in a power failure all the text will be lost. I’ve tried using the “stty” and “cat” commands to open a port and log text, but for whatever reason Terminal won’t even display any ASCII. It’s odd, because stty is definitely opening serial1… trying to open a connection at the same time with SerialConnect returns a “resource busy” error, until I close stty in Terminal.
KP3FT – FB OM. Yes - I’m WB8LZR. Maybe you have my QSL on your wall! Worked a lot of DX.
As far as SerialConnect goes - it won’t ever be in Haiku. It used proprietary BeOS calls. There has been a port of another serial com program called minicom. According to PulkoMandy, it’s available and floating around someplace. Perhaps PulkoMandy is the person who did the port for Haiku, but I don’t know. The original minicom (from gnu) has good auto-logging capability. You might ask PulkoMandy if his port includes all of the gnu options. I cannot vouch for the port - I’ve never used it and I’m just reading from the developer’s IRC channels for this …
OK, thanks! I’ll get a Haiku-compatible USB-Serial adaptor and try it out. Maybe catch you on 10 meters one of these days; I’m only QRV on two bands while in NY, 10m and 2m ssb.
73
Jeff KP3FT
[quote=ronald-scheckelhoff]KP3FT – FB OM. Yes - I’m WB8LZR. Maybe you have my QSL on your wall! Worked a lot of DX.
As far as SerialConnect goes - it won’t ever be in Haiku. It used proprietary BeOS calls. There has been a port of another serial com program called minicom. According to PulkoMandy, it’s available and floating around someplace. Perhaps PulkoMandy is the person who did the port for Haiku, but I don’t know. The original minicom (from gnu) has good auto-logging capability. You might ask PulkoMandy if his port includes all of the gnu options. I cannot vouch for the port - I’ve never used it and I’m just reading from the developer’s IRC channels for this …[/quote]