[3759] in Release_7.7_team
Re: can we enable Xprint printing?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Garry Zacheiss)
Tue Mar 4 22:48:52 2003
Date: Tue, 4 Mar 2003 22:48:48 -0500 (EST)
Message-Id: <200303050348.WAA15528@brad-majors.mit.edu>
From: Garry Zacheiss <zacheiss@MIT.EDU>
To: Alex T Prengel <alexp@MIT.EDU>
CC: release-team@MIT.EDU, alexp@MIT.EDU, ops@MIT.EDU, jamous@MIT.EDU
In-reply-to: "[3750] in Release_7.7_team"
>> I've run into an application (the Eclipse SDK that I've been asked to
>> install by teaching faculty) that requires Xprint printing and am
>> wondering if we can enable this on Athena.
I looked at this for a bit yesterday and today. This is what I
figured out:
- The Xprt shipped in XFree86 is completely broken.
- The Xprt in Solaris 8 seems to work, but the one in current
Solaris 9 is also broken, and according to the xprint
documentation, there's no vendor patch yet. They currently
recommend replacing Xprt with the Solaris 8 version on Solaris
9 systems.
This means that the Xprt binaries shipped with the OSes 9.2 will be
based on are effectively useless, and to do anything with this we'd need
to build from source.
Building from source, I was able to get something that appeared to
work for trivial cases; I defined a print queue that used the Xprint
postscript driver and just dropped the generated files in
/tmp/Xprintjobs rather than spooling them to any printer. That at least
appeared to produce valid postscript when I used the "xphelloworld"
program they provide.
That said, I couldn't actually get eclipse to recognize the
configuration; while I could print with all the utilities I built from
the Xprint distribution, and my $XPSERVERLIST environment variable was
set correctly, the File->Print command in the eclipse GUI remained
greyed out. In the case of the Solaris eclipse binary, I note that it's
not even linked against libXp, so I'm not sure how it's supposed to work
in the first place.
Based on these experiences, I'm going to recommend that we not pursue
this any further, since it seems:
- vendor support is questionable at best.
- The application that needs it is cantankerous and somewhat
obscure, and doesn't seem to come with source code, so I don't
really know how to debug further.
- The things you'd seem to want to print via eclipse (source code
files) can be trivially printed via lpr.
Of course, if we end up with other applications that require this
and/or vendor support improves, we can reconsider this.
Garry
