On Thu, May 09, 2002 at 01:14:05PM -0400, Harry G wrote: >I am using Suse 7.3, and have to use 3 different printers (all >parrallel) depending on the job One HP Laserjet 6L, a Epson Stylus >Color 900, and a Okidata Microline 320 for multi-part forms. Would a >printer selector switche work well under this situation? > >Would I have to reboot if I changed to a different printer? I know >that under some programs, i.e. Mozilla, it always uses the default >printer, but I won't be doing much printing from Mozilla.
I've found the best way to handle this is to use a network print server with multiple parallel ports. I don't know how the Epson would work on one of these because I think it may use the bidirectional capabilities of the parallel port. This shouldn't be a problem with the HP or Oki320. Network printers are easy to configure, and appear as separate printers to Linux so selecting isn't a problem. Radio Shack used to make a two-printer parallel switch that would select the printer by sending an escape sequence at the beginning of the print jobs, and this worked OK by setting up multiple printers with printer interface scripts that sent the appropriate string at the beginning of the job. I'm sure there are similar switches available today, but the programming's a bit more difficult than using network printers. We use the HP JetDirects most frequently for this although there are probably less expensive alternatives available (some of the ones we've used were made by companies that no longer exist -- but then this may soon describe HP :-). Bill -- INTERNET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC UUCP: camco!bill PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way FAX: (206) 232-9186 Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820; (206) 236-1676 URL: http://www.celestial.com/ ``We maintain that the very foundation of our way of life is what we call free enterprise,'' said Cash McCall, ``but when one of our citizens show enough free enterprise to pile up a little of that profit, we do our best to make him feel that he ought to be ashamed of himself.'' -- Cameron Hawley _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list - http://linux-sxs.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-users Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Archives,and Digests are located at the above URL.
