Printing

The old mac G4 server died and it handled the printing for the linux machines, operating as a print server over ethernet. I was tempted by a mac mini but decided to hold off a bit. This meant we had to do something about the printing. I was able to set up Ubuntu to go to the HP jetdirect printer server which drives an ancient apple laserwriter 360 which is the printer for the windoze machines. It works fine but the 360 is very old and when the cartridge runs out it's off to the curb. So i need a better solution for Godzilla, the dual xeon desktop. Which was upgraded this fall to 2 gig of ram, a usb 2.0 card and an nvidia 7600GT video card. The 320 hard disk is sitting there waiting for install...real soon now.

Anyway - our first attempt was to uplug the ethernet from the printer and switch it to parallel.
The printer is an Apple Laserwriter 630 pro, a nice black and white postscript beast. Hauled out an lpt cable from the box and connected it up.

Installation is easy, select system, administration, printing. Choose local printer and select lpt1 port and apple and the model. However, when i printed a test page the postscipt caused an error right after the settings code was sent, right after the %%Title: PPR test page and it printed blank sheets.

The ports are auto configuring but the setup was done using the osx server printer utility - which i no longer have up and running. I could try hooking up one of the many macs lying around and use the localtalk connection and the os9 printer utility to see if the settings can be changed.....or use Plan Z.

Plan Z is to use the NEC 1800 postscript laser printer that has been sitting around gathering dust. Nice printer. So we connect it up with the parallel cable. Of course the rest of the apple test page spits out 4 pages of postsript code until we get an %EOF.

We goto into the printer administration control panel and select lpt1, NEC, 1800 and print out a test page. The Ubuntu Ghostscript version 3010 revision 861 test page comes out. Very nice. We could set this printer up as a share for a backup to the HP jetdirect if the apple 360 dies suddenly. Would be interesting to see if the windoze systems can see it. The printer has an ethernet port but when i put it on the network before the XP boxes could not print to it.

Now we have to put the apple 630 to use - perhaps as a mac os9 printer...