Baslinux mailing list

[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

On Thu, 24 Mar 2005, David Moberg wrote:

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "sindi keesan" <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>
>
> > pbmtoepson filename.pbm > /dev/lp0
> >
> > Printed a few characters, one at the start of each line, and then
> > beeped, and stopped printing.  BL2 and BL3 printed different
> > garbage.
> >
> > Maybe a REAL Epson is needed?
>
> Probably. I have no idea what format all these printers take.

The documentation for netpbm is only found online.  pbmtoepson has a 
switch for 9-pin or for newer escp(1) epsons but it did not seem to work. 
-protocol=escp9 or escp (as opposed to pbmtoescp2 for the stylus). The 
switch was not recognized.

I have an escp/2 to try eventually.  The laser printer appears to have 
electronic problems rather than a paper jam so I hope the deskjet will 
work with pbmtolj.  (In ghostscript deskjet works as ljet, at least in 
mono).

> OK. If you can get anything to work, let me know and I'll make a new
> tarball, with only these included:
>
> pngtopnm
> jpegtopnm
> giftopnm
> tifftopnm
> pstopnm
>
> (for conversion, and also vice versa, p?mtojpeg, p?mtogif, etc)
>
> pbmscale
> pbmreduce
> pnmcrop
> pnmmontage
> pnmrotate

I will make up a better list after some research.

> (editors)
>
> Also, any printer-specific ones that you request.
pbmto  epson   escp2  lj lps ppa (in your first package already)

> ******************
> ---next message---
> ******************
>
> > Image Magick requires a lot of X libraries even to convert and is
> > rather slow.  1 min per pbm > ps on my 200MHz computer, 99.4% cpu
> > usage.  I am hoping netpbm programs will have fewer dependencies and
> > not need X.
>
> They do make a good substitute, even if you can't get the printing ones
> to work.


pbmtoepson seemed much faster, especially if you can print while it is 
converting

> > Xvesa in 8-bit color looks garish - bright red, blue, green in all
> > the wrong places.  On ANY cards. This means you cannot use it with
> > Abiword or Opera or Links2 if your video chip produces 8-bit color or
> > less.
>
> Steven seemed to indicate that it's specific to the BL3 version of Xvesa:
>
> 8-bit color for Xvesa is PseudoColor.  AFAIK the
> PseudoColor routine for our version of Xvesa was
> non-functional.

The Delilinux Xvesa has the same problems, in BL2.  Is there a later 
version of Xvesa to try?

Re framebuffer, we have one Matrox Millenium II card that is VESA 2.0 and 
supposedly framebuffer (a more recent sort of XVESA that supports up to 
1600 resolution).  You would need to make a few changes to the kernel to 
support it and it looks rather complicated.  In addition to 'kernel 
patches' for S3 Trio64 or Virge, there was mention of using UNIVBE in DOS 
(like UNIVESA) to upgrade the VESA capabilities of a card before loading 
linux with loadlin.   Maybe you would like to try this out and provide a 
frame-buffer kernel for 'vesafb'.  Matrox will not work with that, needs 
'matroxfb' (compiled into the kernel?  Or maybe could be modules?).

The Matrox cards are the only ones on a list other than MDA that could be 
used as the video card in a dual-head system.   With two fb devices, you 
could use con2fb and specify during boot which consoles were used with 
which video chip and monitor, as well as setting the resolution by mode 
number (vga=0301).  There is an XF68_FBdev X server which supposedly does 
better than the SVGA one (more resolution?).  XF86Config also needed.

Matrox does something odd with memory that allows this.  This results in a 
complete loss of the VGA screen if you do vga=ask and try to scan (power 
off to fix it), and it crashes DOS viewer Pictview with a 'memory 
allocation error' on exit.  I will not be using it as a primary card with 
DOS/linux but maybe some day could try using two VGA monitors at once.

The board that won't do resizecons properly with Virge works with Trio64 
and Trident and Matrox as expected.  In a dual-monitor system the MDA 
consoles are usable (with cursor) only in 80x25 mode, but you can switch 
modes to what you want for a while, then back to 80x25 to use the second 
monitor.  I fiddled a bit with BIOS video shadowing which did not help (it 
may have made things worse to disable it).

fbset can be used to enable framebuffer console scrollback buffering, 
which normal vga has by default and mda does not have at all.  (Shift 
PageUp or Shift PageDown).

VESA 2.0 cards on a list did not include my Tseng which claims VESA 2.0 
but did have PCI cards from ATI, SiS, STB, Riva, Genoa and Hercules.  Are 
all AGP cards VESA 2.0?

> David


Sindi
keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org