Here is the most current information that we have about Sun's Printers, and our PShop ^TM (the product formerly known as PostShop ® ) support for them.

Lastest revision: June 18, 1999

With respect to Sun's legacy printers, we are making a conscientious effort to be responsive to customer needs (and budgets!). If you have some number of SPARCprinter ® II's or NP-20's that you need supported, please tell us, and we'll put your name on our list. At some point there may be sufficient interest that we will make these drivers. We will notify all the people on this list when there are any developments.

NeWSPrint upgrades, SPARC ® Printer notes, "lpvi driver missing"

June 2, 1997.

Most Vividata PShop customers who have the Sun SPARCprinter ® and are now getting setup with PShop already have Sun's lpvi driver installed on their system from when they were using NewsPrint.

Vividata PShop ^TM supports printing to the original Sun SPARCprinter ® through the lpvi driver. There is a catch: you have to have an lpvi driver. All Sun customers with NeWSPrinters originally must have had lpvi on their systems. lpvi was included with NeWSPrint, the original software for SPARCprinters ®.

Customers who have lost NewsPrint media, who have an obsolete lpvi driver, or who have just changed OS's from SunOS to Solaris, need to replace or refresh the lpvi (driver from Sun) that they previously licensed with NeWSPrint.

As far as we know, the newest lpvi driver is available from the sunsolve website. So it would appear that in general users and sysadmins may either get the driver from their own support groups or directly from Sun. The majority of Vividata's customers have access to Sun contract support.

Looking at Sun's copyright notice at the patches' website, it says that for non-commercial use anyone is granted permission to pass on copies of these files. Vividata, Inc. is not charging any fee for access to these files.

As far as we can tell at the moment, these are the patches that contain the very last versions for SunOS and Solaris of the lpvi drivers...

SunOS:

Synopsis: NeWSprint 2.2 Rev A: Jumbo patch.
Patch-ID# 101678-23
Keywords: Japanese SPARCprinter II NeWSprinter20 NeWSprinterCL+ SPARCprinter.
Date: Jun/25/97
Solaris Release: 1.0, 1.1, 1.1.1

http://sunsolve.sun.com/private-cgi/doc2html?patches/101678. Description.

locally:

Patch 101678 Description.

Patch 101678-23.tar.Z

Solaris 2.x:

Synopsis: NeWSprint 2.5B: SPARCprinter jumbo patch
Patch-ID# 102211-05
Keywords: SPARCprinter, lpvi, queue, hung, TRAY, return, code, EnergyStar
Date: Feb/20/98
Solaris Release: 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 2.5.1, 2.6, 2.7

http://sunsolve.sun.com/private-cgi/retrieve.pl?type=0&doc=patches%2F102211&zone_32=102211 Description.

locally:

Patch 102211 Description.

Patch 102211-05.tar.Z itself.

Extra Installation Instructions:

Beyond the use of the Vividata installer and ps_install to create the SPARCprinter ® print queue, some non-automated installation steps are required in order for the SPARCprinter's ® lpvi driver to be installed. For the system to know about lpvi during a "boot -r", the driver must be installed with "add_drv".

Here are the steps:

1. "su" to root. Untar the patch file. "cd" into the patch directory.

2. Copy the driver module ("lpvi") into /kernel/drv

3. Add this line to the end of /etc/devlink.tab:

            "type=ddi_pseudo;name=SUNW,lpvi   \M0"

Warning: the space between lpvi and \M0 must be a single tab! Multiples will cause failure.

4. Run add_drv:

            /usr/sbin/add_drv -i "SUNW,lpvi" lpvi

5. Do a "touch /reconfigure" and reboot, or a "boot -r".

6. When the system comes back up, confirm the existence of /dev/lpvi*. Do an ls -l to see the file it points to. (see below). Verify that the permissions bits on /devices/... entry are 666. For example, this is what we have on our system:

# ls -lg /dev/lp*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root other 45 Sep 25 1996 /dev/lpvi0 -> ../devices/sbus@1f,0/SUNW,lpvi@0,300000:lpvi0

# ls -lg /devices/sbus@1f,0/SUNW,lpvi@0,300000:lpvi0
crw-rw-rw- 1 root sys 127, 0 Aug 12 17:35 /devices/sbus@1f,0/SUNW,lpvi@0,300000:lpvi0

To reverse the whole thing:

1. Run rem_drv:

          /usr/sbin/rem_drv lpvi

2. Remove the links in /dev:

 
          rm /dev/lpvi*

Email support@vividata.com if you need more info!

There is more information about the EOL (discontinuation) of NeWSPrint...

White Papers/Tech Bulletins article 1350

Title: NeWSprint: Strategies for Customer Base Migration White Paper

NeWSprint, Sun's open printing software, was discontinued (known within Sun as EndOfLife or "EOL") in mid-1995, when Sun introduced its SPARCprinter ® E series of network printers. This represented a shift from host-based printing to intelligent, network-connect printers. Early in 1996, it was announced that Sun would shift to a Reference Sell model for printers to better serve our end-users. Even with these shifts, NeWSprint licenses are still being issued at 25% the rate of just two years ago. There clearly remains an at-large NeWSprint user community. This white paper characterizes the current NeWSprint userbase and suggests customer transition strategies for the immediate future.

PostScript version from SunSolve's site

locally:

PostScript version

Here are a couple of "quotable quotes" from Sun personnel about PShop (the product formerly known as PostShop):

"PostShop fills the void for a printing solution ... on the UNIX platform," says Robert Teng, Technology Marketing Manager for SunSoft. "The PostShop software complements SunSoft's long-term strategy for ... future releases of Solaris."

And...

"Sun's employees are rapidly moving towards new work environments such as nomadics and telecommuting," says Jay Littlepage, Director of Alternative Workplace Technology in Sun Information Resources. "We needed a local printing solution which would take advantage of the inexpensive ink-jet printers which are already common in the homes of our employees, lowering our telecommuting program costs. We will also utilize portable printers which can be carried by our sales force. With Postshop, our mobile workers will be able to print out very high-quality images where ever they may be."

(His organization at Sun licensed PShop for all of Sun's employees company-wide and world-wide. Here's a press release on the topic from 1996.)

As we like to say

"Where else can you find a COLOR PostScript printer that weighs under three pounds?" ... and that costs under $1,000?

To read even more raves about our products...