Mac Forum / General / Hardware / August 2004

More accurately, Apple's USB drivers don't support 2.0 high-speed.

There's nothing in the OS 9 architecture that would prevent a
hardware vendor from providing a system extension to make high speed
work.  (The fact that I don't think anyone has actually done this is
a separate point.)

Not necessarily.  You can print from OS 9 to OS X, if you know how to
set it up.

Turn on printer sharing on OS X.  This, in addition to other things,
starts up the cups-lpd daemon, which allows printing via the
UNIX-style lpr interface.  This daemon accepts jobs in the form of
PostScript or plain text data, converts it to your printer's format,
and prints them.

(The above is assuming you have OS X 10.3.  Older versions don't come
with cups for printing.  The generic Berkeley lpd daemon can also be
used, but it won't convert incoming documents from PostScript to your
printer's native format, forcing you to either have a compatible
driver on the remote computer or a PostScript printer.)

I just tested this out on my own system, printing via TCP/IP from a
Windows box, this way:
   - Add a "local" printer
   - When asked for a port, say you want TCP/IP printing
   - On the dialog provided, type in the IP address of the OS X box
   - Windows won't be able to auto-identify the printer.  That's
     fine.  Select "custom".  Select LPR-style printing and type in
     the printer's OS X device name as the queue name.  If you don't
     know what this is, look at the file /etc/printcap.  The first
     field will be the printer name.  In my case, it is DESKJET_840C
     Set the check box for LPR-style byte-counting.
   - When asked for a printer driver, pick something PostScript.  I
     selected the Apple Color LaserWriter driver
   - Print a test page - which worked fine.

The equivalent mechanism on classic MacOS is to use the "LaserWriter 8"
driver in the Chooser.  You should be able to configure it for an
LPR-type network printer.  Provide the IP address of your OS X box
and the printer name as your queue name.

If you set it up and something doesn't work, view the system log (use
/Applications/Unitieis/Console to view it).  Any messages produced by
cups-lpd or xinetd (the daemon that acts as a proxy for cups-lpd and
other things) will be in there.  Some of the messages I saw while
setting up my test (dates and hostnames stripped, and word-wrapped to
be easily read in an 80-column news posting) include:

   xinetd[347]: START: printer pid=996 from=192.168.1.7
   cups-lpd[996]: Connection from [hostname snipped] (192.168.1.7)
   cups-lpd[996]: Receive print job for DESKJET_840C
   cups-lpd[996]: Error while reading file - Result too large
   cups-lpd[996]: Closing connection

I was seeing these errors ("Result too large") and nothing was
printing.  Turning on LPR-style byte counting on Windows fixed this.

   xinetd[347]: START: printer pid=1010 from=192.168.1.7
   cups-lpd[1010]: Connection from [hostname snipped] (192.168.1.7)
   cups-lpd[1010]: Receive print job for DESKJET_840C
   cups-lpd[1010]: Unable to print file -
                   client-error-document-format-not-supported
   cups-lpd[1010]: Closing connection

I was seeing these errors (document format not supported) when I was
using the Windows DeskJet driver.  I didn't realize, at first, that
cups wants everything in PostScript format.

   xinetd[347]: START: printer pid=1022 from=192.168.1.7
   cups-lpd[1022]: Connection from [hostname snipped] (192.168.1.7)
   cups-lpd[1022]: Receive print job for DESKJET_840C
   cups-lpd[1022]: Print file - job ID = 326
   cups-lpd[1022]: Closing connection

This sequence of messages indicates a print job that was successfully
received and printed.  A few seconds after seeing this, the page
printed.

Good luck.  This isn't hard to setup, but it's a little hard to
explain it all in a news post.

-- David

As for that. I had trouble finding a CD Burner for my PPC 7500, so I ended up
gettting a Firewire PCI Adapter, then got a LaCei 52x burnner. This burner
Kicks-a.s.!!.  five minutes to do what the iomega couldn't even do at 4x.
Say mabey 30 min + for 400 MB on the USB Iomega, and the LaCei is about 5 min.
for 600 MB.
...something to think about....DaveC...

Where do you find the Expostfacto program from ?  I did a search for
downloads by that name and found nothing or nowhere to download it from ?