To Everyone who wants STN to be a printer server too:
I've been researching exactly how to do this, and I have some comments and
questions. It seems that any lpd software out there expects to be able to
spool the entire print file to disk before printing it. This obviously
won't fit in the 12-100K left on the floppy.
This leaves one of two places
1) A ram drive.
A RAM drive is limited by, well, ram. If you want to have a decently large
spool area, you're going to need a lot of RAM. That 100 page Word for
Windows document you want to print has to fit too. So all of the sudden you
have to go out and buy 64 megs of ram. Maybe it's worth it -- I don't know.
2) A hard drive.
Requiring a HD really goes against the grain. Sure STN will support a HD if
you have one, but I REALLY hate to start adding software that REQUIRES a
hard drive to be present. That's really another product for another day.
Also, there doesn't seem to be a native way for Windows 9x to print to a LPD
printer. You can do it with NT, and you can share the NT LPD printer, but
if you have just win9x, then you're stuck. There are third party packages
available, and I'm going to look into them, but this might be a problem for
some.
I haven't looked into Samba yet, it may be the solution for Windows
networks. It probably has the same spool issue though.
So the questions:
1) Would you still want to use your STN box as a print server if it required
enough free ram to fit the largest job you have?
2) Can you live with adding a third party package so you can print from
win9x?
Regards,
John
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