From: Dave on
I've got a HP laserjet Postscript printer which has been hit by
lightning, making it impossible to print via a network. However, the
printer also has USB on it, and it appears the USB still works.

Is there a way I can get a Solaris 10 update 7 (SPARC) system to use a
USB printer? I know it's not an ideal situation, and one I will
hopefully resolve by replacing the printer in a week or two, but in the
mean time, it would be good if I could somehow print from this thing.

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From: cjt on
Dave wrote:
> I've got a HP laserjet Postscript printer which has been hit by
> lightning, making it impossible to print via a network. However, the
> printer also has USB on it, and it appears the USB still works.
>
> Is there a way I can get a Solaris 10 update 7 (SPARC) system to use a
> USB printer? I know it's not an ideal situation, and one I will
> hopefully resolve by replacing the printer in a week or two, but in the
> mean time, it would be good if I could somehow print from this thing.
>
I can think of at least a couple of ways:

1) If the SPARC system has a USB port, hook it up directly, or

2) If not, get a cheap print server from, e.g., Best Buy, to hold you
over (actually, I generally get them at the local Goodwill, but that's
a bit hit-or-miss).
From: Dave on
cjt wrote:
> Dave wrote:
>> I've got a HP laserjet Postscript printer which has been hit by
>> lightning, making it impossible to print via a network. However, the
>> printer also has USB on it, and it appears the USB still works.
>>
>> Is there a way I can get a Solaris 10 update 7 (SPARC) system to use a
>> USB printer? I know it's not an ideal situation, and one I will
>> hopefully resolve by replacing the printer in a week or two, but in
>> the mean time, it would be good if I could somehow print from this thing.
>>
> I can think of at least a couple of ways:
>
> 1) If the SPARC system has a USB port, hook it up directly, or
>
> 2) If not, get a cheap print server from, e.g., Best Buy, to hold you
> over (actually, I generally get them at the local Goodwill, but that's
> a bit hit-or-miss).

Thank you. I was not aware there was support for USB printers in Solaris
10. I just hooked it up and managed to get it to print a simple text
file. The filename /dev/printer0 seemed like a good guess for what port
the printer was on. I expected to be able to do this in OpenSolaris, but
not on Solaris 10.

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From: Martha Starkey on
Dave wrote:
> cjt wrote:
>> Dave wrote:
>>> I've got a HP laserjet Postscript printer which has been hit by
>>> lightning, making it impossible to print via a network. However, the
>>> printer also has USB on it, and it appears the USB still works.
>>>
>>> Is there a way I can get a Solaris 10 update 7 (SPARC) system to use
>>> a USB printer? I know it's not an ideal situation, and one I will
>>> hopefully resolve by replacing the printer in a week or two, but in
>>> the mean time, it would be good if I could somehow print from this
>>> thing.
>>>
>> I can think of at least a couple of ways:
>>
>> 1) If the SPARC system has a USB port, hook it up directly, or
>>
>> 2) If not, get a cheap print server from, e.g., Best Buy, to hold you
>> over (actually, I generally get them at the local Goodwill, but that's
>> a bit hit-or-miss).
>
> Thank you. I was not aware there was support for USB printers in Solaris
> 10. I just hooked it up and managed to get it to print a simple text
> file. The filename /dev/printer0 seemed like a good guess for what port
> the printer was on. I expected to be able to do this in OpenSolaris, but
> not on Solaris 10.
>

In my recollection, USB printer support came along in
the latter days of Solaris 8, but now that I look at
the documentation, it's first mentioned in the Solaris
9 docs.
From: Dave on
Martha Starkey wrote:
> Dave wrote:

>> Thank you. I was not aware there was support for USB printers in
>> Solaris 10. I just hooked it up and managed to get it to print a
>> simple text file. The filename /dev/printer0 seemed like a good guess
>> for what port the printer was on. I expected to be able to do this in
>> OpenSolaris, but not on Solaris 10.
>>
>
> In my recollection, USB printer support came along in the latter days of
> Solaris 8, but now that I look at the documentation, it's first
> mentioned in the Solaris 9 docs.

I'm not sure how to get double-sided I must admit. The printer has a
duplexer, and some software downloaded from the HP site allows that to
work on Solaris via ethernet. I'll have to check if that supports USB.

Ultimately though, I hope to replace the printer pretty soon. Which
brings me to the subject of another post of mine!


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