Using SPARCprinter with Ghostscript and Solaris 2.5.1
(if you can't get NeWSprint to work)

John W. Emerson
john.emerson@yale.edu

This document describes steps I used to install a SPARCprinter on a Solaris 2.5.1 machine. I rely heavily on the documents provided by Jens Claussen (using Solaris 2.6 with NeWSprint 2.5B and providing the major Ghostscript-related hints) and Alexander Panasyuk (focusing on more than just the SPARCprinter and Solaris 2.5.1, assuming driver integration in Ghostscript, and providing good suggestions for using filters). This document seeks to synthesize the best of each of these previous documents, adding instructions necessary if you lost your NeWSprint CD (or if you can't get it to work with your new OS). Commercial software is available (from Vividata, for example), but the cost seems excessive if you can do it yourself for free.

Disclaimer
I accept no responsibility for anything that happens should you follow (or not follow) these instructions.  Nor should Jens or Alexander be held responsible for anything that happens because you follow (or do not follow) their instructions or their instructions which I include here merely for completeness. Almost everything will require root permission, though I recommend compiling Ghostscript as a regular user (and then doing the install as root).

If you have a SPARCprinter, you (at some point in time) must have had the lpvi driver from your NeWSprint software. You may obtain the updated lpvi driver from your Sun representative or free from Vividata, I understand: 102211-04.tar.gz with the header file lpviio.h. Following the lead of Vividata, I note that permission is granted from Sun for non-commercial distribution of this patch. As far as I know, these are all available directly from Sun Microsystems or through one of your UNIX support groups.

Requirements (kind of)
I only tested this install under the requirements above. I note, however, that Alexander's page indicates that similar installs are possible using other printers, and Jens' page indicates that the version of Solaris probably shouldn't cause any unforseen problems, either. Other versions of Ghostscript (as far back as 2.53, perhaps) also shouldn't pose a problem. Links to these pages are provided above.

Instructions

1.  Install the lpvi driver.  (Make sure you have the patched version -- see above.)  These instructions are modified from the ones available from Vividata, which I found to be incomplete.
2.  Compile the SPARCprinter driver into Ghostscript.  I found Jen's instructions to be very helpful, and so I provide minimalist notes here.  I used gcc and GNU make.  I strongly recommend that you read make.txt, install.txt, and possibly use.txt if you are not completely comfortable with compiling and using Ghostscript fron scratch.
3.  Manually print a postscript file to see if you are in business so far...  I found the following to work for me, a happy medium between the suggestions of Jens and Alexander: I broke this line to make it easier to read.  There is also a -dPAPERSIZE option, for those of you who use a4 paper, for example.  Other options (like -dFIXEDMEDIA, for example) are described in Ghostscript's use.txt.   After everything is working, you will probably want to add the -q option to block out the Ghostscript messages produced during the file processing.

4.  Set up the Solaris print services.  I had to do some work here, synthesizing from Jens and Alexander only seemed to allow me to print postscript as well as simple ASCII text files. This could have been my fault, obviously, but here is what worked for me.
5. I think that is it!!!  The lpr -Psparcprinter <filename> command should now work, as well as printing from Netscape, etc... If you have questions, comments, corrections, or if it doesn't work (or if it does) please feel free to email me, at john.emerson@yale.edu.  This file was originally created on August 2, 1998. I will list any modification dates below -- there are none yet.