Hi Chris,
Before anything, I just want to say for anyone that have the same problems as
me to get recognize the serial device (or even just to make it work without
permissions problems) that this problem is solved just by adding yourself to
the '''dialout''' group like this :
sudo gpasswd -a USERNAME dialout
(just change '''USERNAME''' by your user name).
Now about the question. I couldn't find a TSP650 for a good price (it was
almost the double of this one even in second hand). And I've looked for
drivers for this one. Now the problem is the fallowing. Every driver (at
least those that I've seen) from Star Micronics are licensed under the GPLv2
license only (no dual license then). And the source code is available in the
drives package (at least for the Gnu/Linux and MacOsX one).
Better than that, before 2011 they've released a library that could be used
to make any application work with any Star Micronics device (released until
that year) under any OS independent of the connection (Ethernet, Serial, USB
etc...), but I couldn't make it work since some important sources where
missing from the package and the binary would compile because of the lack of
libraries for the qt3 part on Trisquel 6.0 (I didn't tried under and older
version of Trisquel). This library is licensed under the LPGLv2 license.
And to finish, now they have developed and SDK for every device in order to
anyone to adapt and create any application that could use this device. Which
is way better but still with the same license.
Now we have 2 problems :
1 - This device (and even the 650 that uses almost the same drivers), have
been abandoned by the company and will not receive any further support (I've
already tried by email, even the developer of the application doesn't work
there anymore).
2 - In cups we have only 2 drivers from Star Micronics available on the
Ubuntu repositories, and why ? Because of the filters, this drivers need a
special filter created by Star Micronics (other than that it would just print
some rubbish text like mine is doing which is better than nothing) but I
couldn't find any sources anywhere, and it doesn't seem to have a x64 version
(without talking about the fact that the x86 version is only available for
Fedora under the RPM format and doesn't even work because it asks for very
old libraries).
So for know this is the full situation of all Star Micronics devices I've
seen (TSP650 included). You need 2 things :
1 - A device with usb or ethernet connection
2 - Fedora 8 or Fedora 9 x86 in order to install the driver correctly and
make it work.
In my opinion, the real problem here is the text-only driver that doesn't
work, this one could be the solution for those kind of devices (Epson and IBM
included) that doesn't have drivers and only work by sending direct values to
the serial location. Other don't work because they send headers,
configurations or even coded text for the printer to understand do the work.
I will try to do some tweak on the textonly ppd and try to find the source
code for the star filers called (if I'm not spelling it wrong) :
- '''rasterstar'''
- '''rasterstarlm'''
I will not give the "Code it yourself" as a solution, because in many cases
(like my case), the certified application are almost all proprietary, and
even those who are not (even those licensed under the GPLv2 or GPLv3 license)
can't be modified or else it would need to be certified under a new name
(this really need to be seen by a lawyer...)
Best Regards,
Luis Da Costa
