Here is a midpoint summary.
Everbody agrees that Newsprint is no longer supported under 2.6. One
person confirmed that the lpvi sbus card for the Newsprint20 *is* still
supported.
I had 2 me too, please summarize...
3 people suggested I use ghostscript as a substitute, but did not provide
details. When I installed ghostscript a few years ago I was only interested in
displaying to the screen, so I only have x11, pbm, pbmraw, pgm, pgmraw, ppm,
and ppmraw drivers installed. I'm guessing that sparc.dev will work for the
Newsprint20, but have no idea what device, if any, will work for the CL+. I
guess I'll have to try all the color printer drivers and see if one works...
This will happen later.
Does anybody know which device I need to support CL+ using ghostscript?
One person suggested getting a set of print drivers from a company called
Vivdata. These are apparently based on ghostview. I did not follow up on this
option.
Many people suggested that perhaps Sun was actually doing me a favour.
Sun is not a printer company, and there is good reason they got out of trying.
That I should take this opportunity to retire these printers. I'm not
interested in doing that right now, they have lots of good life in them. The
Newsprinter20 has actually been a very good printer for us. The CL+ are not so
great, but Sun gave us 4 of these so at least the initial cost was right, and
they are barely broken in. Long term of course these printers will be
replaced, which will solve my problem.
1 person suggested that I leave these printserver machines at 2.5.
My plan is:
1) leave the machines at 2.5 for now.
2) get and compile the latest ghostscript and include support for many more
print drivers (I have gs 2.61 so an upgrade is probably a good idea anyway). I
suspect I will find support for the NeWSprint20, and hopefully the CL+ as
well. If I cannot get gs to support the CL+ I will consider as a medium term
solution replacing them with Epson Stylus 800 ($360) which was specifically
recommended as providing much better output anyway.
3) Eventually replace both printers with networked postscript printers.
Thanks for your replies.
David
I asked:
> We are getting ready to upgrade our machines from 2.5 or 2.5.1
> to 2.6. But, I understand that NeWSprint software is not
> supported under Solaris 2.6 - arg!
> We have a NeWSprint20 and NeWSprintCL+ that we would like
> to keep using, but prefer that all systems run the same OS.
> How can Sun sell us a printer, then less than two years later
> drop support for it... not good business practice!
> What are the best workarounds for this?
David Knight
Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Tel: (518)-442-4204
SUNYA ES-228 Fax: (518)-442-4494
Albany, NY 12222 Email: knight@atmos.albany.edu
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