Printing Problems

[Stephen Corbesero]

I have just upgraded some Sun workstataions, and a NEC QMS-890
(postscript) laser printer that used to work fine has redeveloped
buffering problems.  This was a difficult printer to connect in the first
place, as we ended up conneting it via a serial port on the Sun into a a
serial<>parallel converter into the parallel port on the printer.  This
configuration had been working quite well until I upgraded.  I'd like to
get this printer working again, and have two paths.

1. Come up with a working printcap.  The xon/xoff flow control (which the
   converter was generating) is not being handled by th workstation, even
   though I tried a variety of settings in /etc/printcap.

2. I have a Sun-3/80, which has a centronics parallel port, that is
   supposedly compatible with a wide varity of PC printers, according to the
   sparse documentation in the  hardware overview.  Hooking up a parallel dot
   matrix printer to this port produced very discouraging results.  When I
   cat-ed a file to /dev/pp0, the command timed-out with an write error on
   the port, BUT the first character did get printed after that.  If there a
   known problem with the pp0 hardware and/or software driver?

Thanks for any help, thoughts, or suggestions.