Using lpstyl over AppleTalk --------------------------- Verison 0.9.9 of lpstyl contains preliminary support for StyleWriters connected to Ethernet with an "Apple StyleWriter Ethertalk Adapter". (Apple part number M4877.) This has only been tested with a StyleWriter 2400 and a 68k machine running NetBSD. I'd be interested in the results people with other printer types and/or little-endian machines get with this code. I'd also like to find out whether this code will work with the "Farallon EtherMac iPrint Adapter SL", which is another device that performs a similar if not identical function and looks very similar to the Apple device (appears to be the same plastics), but is still in production. (I'm pretty sure the Apple device has been discontinued.) If you try this code out with one of these things, _please_ let me know what happens. You'll have to do a number of things to set this up: 1) Make sure netatalk is installed on your machine and compiled into the kernel. 2) Make sure your machine is set up to communicate over AppleTalk. This is a bit complex, and full instructions are included with the netatalk package. atalkd should be running, 'ifconfig -a' should show an AppleTalk address bound to your Ethernet interface(s), and 'netstat -r' should show some AppleTalk routes. 3) Find out where the atalk headers and libraries are installed. (The included makefile assumes they are in /usr/local/include/atalk/ and /usr/local/lib, respectively.) 4) Set up your printer and Ethernet adapter, and attach them to the network. You may want to use the MacOS driver to set the name of the printer to something reasonable. In the examples here, the printer is a StyleWriter 2400 with the name "PaperShredder". 5) Find out your printer's nbp name. This can be done with the netatalk tool 'nbplkup'. It will give you a number of lines of output, one of which contains the name you gave your printer. On my system, this line is: PaperShredder:ColorStyleWriter2400AT 65280.1:129 6) Compile and install a version of lpstyl with AppleTalk support. The easiest way to do this is to use the Makefile.atalk included with the package. Copy it to 'Makefile' and do 'make lpstyl'. Note that a version compiled with AppleTalk support will still be able to print to serial connections. 7) Install lpstyl and the driver scripts as usual. Modify the printcap entry you want to use so that it points to one of the *-atalk scripts, and change the name of the AppleTalk device in that script to the name you retrieved in step 5. That should be it. Try printing something. If it doesn't work, add '-vvvvv' to the lpstyl invocation in the script you're using and examine the results in lpd-errs. If they're not self-explanatory, send me mail and we'll try and figure it out. -- Monroe Williams a.k.a. monroe@pobox.com -- Copyright 1996-2000 Monroe Williams, all rights reserved.