Very Computer

Greetings,

I'm trying to install an aged P100 to be my print server.  I have an HP6L
connected to it via parallel port.  The OS is FreeBSD 4.5_RELEASE, and I
installed aspfilter to enable printing.  Ghostscript-gnu-6.52 is also
installed.  I selected ljet4 with 600dpi as the device for ghostscript.
This machine as 32MB of physical RAM and 127MB of swap.

I then tested to print a 2-page ps file, and it went through without any
problem.  I then tried to print a PDF file by:

lpr my.pdf

but nothing came out.  lpq showed that some print job was present but it
was then magically disappeared.  Thinking that there may be something
wrong with the PDF file, I converted the pdf into ps file by:

pdf2ps my.pdf my.ps

and tried to print the ps file instead.  The file conversion was
successful, but the printing of the ps file (13MB) was not.  After waiting
for about 10 minutes, "top" showed:

last pid:   748;  load averages:  0.05,  0.01,  0.00  up 0+01:24:07    22:59:45
33 processes:  1 running, 32 sleeping

Mem: 10M Active, 6848K Inact, 7304K Wired, 2852K Cache, 6208K Buf, 644K Free
Swap: 127M Total, 4700K Used, 122M Free, 3% Inuse

  PID USERNAME PRI NICE  SIZE    RES STATE    TIME   WCPU    CPU COMMAND
  748 root      33   0  1920K   896K RUN      0:00  9.00%  0.44% top
   86 root       2   0  2512K   408K select  11:37  0.00%  0.00% sendmail
  719 daemon    -6   0 14212K  6756K pipdwt   0:10  0.00%  0.00% gs
   84 root       2   0  2224K   128K select   0:05  0.00%  0.00% sshd
  604 chene      2   0  2304K   580K select   0:04  0.00%  0.00% ssh
  717 daemon    -6   0  1244K   520K pipdwt   0:03  0.00%  0.00% awk
  113 root       2   0  1856K   508K select   0:01  0.00%  0.00% nmbd
  605 root      18   0  1332K   580K pause    0:01  0.00%  0.00% tcsh
  100 root       2   0   912K   176K select   0:01  0.00%  0.00% moused
  697 daemon    10   0  1164K   268K wait     0:01  0.00%  0.00% bash
  714 daemon    -6   0   224K    40K pipdwt   0:01  0.00%  0.00% cat
   70 root       2   0   948K   300K select   0:01  0.00%  0.00% syslogd
   79 root      10   0   988K   268K nanslp   0:01  0.00%  0.00% cron
  602 chene     18   0  1316K   220K pause    0:00  0.00%  0.00% tcsh
  598 root      10   0  1216K   232K wait     0:00  0.00%  0.00% login
  596 root      10   0  1216K   236K wait     0:00  0.00%  0.00% login
   82 root       2   0   972K   164K select   0:00  0.00%  0.00% lpd
  111 root       2   0  2704K   556K select   0:00  0.00%  0.00% smbd

so, anyone got an idea why printing is so slow, or is it printing at all?
I'm willing to provide more information if needed.

any help is very much appreciated,

ECC

EC>
EC> Greetings,
EC>
EC> I'm trying to install an aged P100 to be my print server.  I have an HP6L
EC> connected to it via parallel port.  The OS is FreeBSD 4.5_RELEASE, and I

        Try putting the parallel port into polling mode with lptcontrol, you
will need to stop lpd first of course

--
C:>WIN                                          |     Directable Mirrors
The computer obeys and wins.                    |A Better Way To Focus The Sun
You lose and Bill collects.                     |  licenses available - see:
                                                |   http://www.sohara.org/