Serial adapter printing requires added software?

Jaguar, Panther, Tiger don't provide serial support.

Hello,

OS X does not directly support a serial port. Even if your computer (such as a PowerMac G3) shipped with a serial port built-in, it will be disabled in OS X.

So, therefore, you will still need to use your serial port's driver to enable functional operation.

The driver you found built-in uses the Gimp-Print software. You can read about this here:

http://gutenprint.sourceforge.net/index.php3

Gimp-Print essentially a Unix package that provides Unix users with the ability to print to many different printers. This means that Unix users can now print to a large variety of old and new PC and Mac printers.

Most Unix machines will have the parallel ports and some sort of serial port built-in and operating.

Since the Mac OS X is built on-top of Unix, we gain the ability to use Unix software. And, this includes this package of printer drivers.

With this package of drivers, we gain the ability to use printers for which there are no Mac drivers. So, now we can use many PC printers.

But, the Mac's do not include parallel printer ports, serial ports, or any of the other ports available on other Unix machines.

So, you have to find your own way of connecting the printer to the machine.

This package does not provide you with the connection method. Just the software to communicate with the printer if you can get it connected.

So, you still need to supply whatever adapter is necessary, and install the driver if one is needed to recognize your adapter in OS X.

So, you should be able to use the Print Driver just fine after you get the adapter working with it's driver.

Hopefully this little explanation will help to make your situation clearer.


I hope this helps.

Glad to help 🙂

<snip>

So, you still need to supply whatever adapter is
necessary, and install the driver if one is needed to
recognize your adapter in OS X.

A good description and correct through this last statement.

So, you should be able to use the Print Driver just
fine after you get the adapter working with it's
driver.

Not quite. With the USB to serial adapter and its drivers, the serial port is now functional in OS X. We must now turn to the printing software used by Mac OS X. CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) is used in OS X for printing. As supplied by Apple, however, the CUPS software does not provide support for communicating with serial ports. I have compiled serial backends (serial communications software) that enable this on my website about serial printing in Mac OS X.. There is also a PDF pictorial guide on how to add a serial printer available for download.

So this is a multilayer process.
1. Get an adapter -- the Keyspan adapter
2. Get the serial ports recognized by OS X -- the Keyspan drivers.
3. Get the serial ports recognized by CUPS -- my Serial Print Enabler.
4. Get printer drivers -- for the HP DeskWriter, Gutenprint (Gimp-Print drivers work well). You could also use the hpijs package from linuxprinting.org.
5. Configure the printer through the CUPS web interface. Printer Setup Utility does not have a capability to deal with serial ports.

The StyleWriter situation is a bit different in that it uses a different driver called "lpstyl". The StyleWriter driver needs direct communication with the printer rather than through a serial backend. Therefore, the lpstyl driver contains all the necessary code to use the serial port. No other serial print enabler is required. That is why it is not mentioned in my post about the StyleWriter.

Hopefully this little explanation will help to make
your situation clearer.

Ditto.

I hope this helps.

Ditto.

Matt


Mac Mini; B&W G3/300

Jaguar, Panther, Tiger don't provide serial support.

Not true Greg. I can't speak for Tiger, but Panther and Jaguar were able to use the serial ports on beige G3 and the PowerBooks that had built in serial ports. For printing, you still had to add a serial backend, but the ports themselves were recognized and functional in Jaguar and Panther.

Matt

Thanks, Matt, for the clarification.
Maybe I got hung up on the backend/cups driver issue...