Printing to HPIB port via network

[Pete]

G'day All,
I have acquired an old HP 7585B pen plotter. This unit has a stuffed
serial unterface, but the GPIB is working fine. I am looking into the
fesability of building a Linux box to enable me to make the plotter
available over a LAN.

I have an old pentium 100 box to drive the show, and can use either a Plug
and Play or a jumpered National Instruments ISA GPIB card.

My general train of thought goes something like this :
Use a curent distro for security / compatibility as I can choose to run
in a shell without running up X windows.
Run Samba to enable sharing to the windows boxes, though I am not sure
if I need to do this at all.
Cups to handle the printing.

I have been unable to find any sort of driver file to suit the plotter, but
I do have the GPIB programming manual for it so I guess it is feasable to
write my own, given sufficent patience.

I have found nothing so far to indicate if / how Cups will use the GPIB card
in place of the Lpt / Comm port.

Or am I simply reading too much into this, and I should be able to write
directally to the GPIB sort of like a line device ?

Any help appreciated,


Pete

[Bruce Stewart]

Post by Pete
G'day All,
I have acquired an old HP 7585B pen plotter. This unit has a stuffed
serial unterface, but the GPIB is working fine. I am looking into the
fesability of building a Linux box to enable me to make the plotter
available over a LAN.
I have an old pentium 100 box to drive the show, and can use either a Plug
and Play or a jumpered National Instruments ISA GPIB card.
Use a curent distro for security / compatibility as I can choose to run
in a shell without running up X windows.
Run Samba to enable sharing to the windows boxes, though I am not sure
if I need to do this at all.
Cups to handle the printing.
I have been unable to find any sort of driver file to suit the plotter,
but I do have the GPIB programming manual for it so I guess it is feasable
to write my own, given sufficent patience.
I have found nothing so far to indicate if / how Cups will use the GPIB
card in place of the Lpt / Comm port.
Or am I simply reading too much into this, and I should be able to write
directally to the GPIB sort of like a line device ?
Any help appreciated,
Pete

If you have the Windows print drivers (assuming you will be printing from
windows based machines) there doesn't need to be print drivers on the Linux
side, all you need is lpd or CUPS to print to some kind of text device. The
Windows machines then print to a lpr style queue on the Linux box. Though
using samba makes printing from the windows side a bit easier.
Now this usually requires some kind of text device under \dev.
Have you managed to get basic driver support for the GPIB card? If so have
you been able to start communicating with any of the GPIB devices using
Linux?

(comp.os.linux.hardware added is this may add extra answers to your initial
questions)

Bruce S.