[Foomatic] My Lexmark X125 driver needs to read from the printer

Mark Roth markroth8 at yahoo.com
Tue Jan 13 08:21:54 PST 2004


In article <mailman.1074006961.28040.foomatic-devel at linuxprinting.org>, David
Chappell <David.Chappell at trincoll.edu> writes:
> Does this code really belong in the driver?  The only reason I can think 
> of is if the driver actually uses the returned data stream.  I think 
> that the driver should generate the byte stream and then pass it on to 
> the spooler for transmission.  The spooler can then take care of 
> whatever has to be done to send it over a paralell port, USB, TCP, etc 
> without getting locked up.  Interface-specific codes just doesn't belong 
> in the driver.

Putting the code in the spooler makes sense to me, and it would work for my
driver.

However, that would mean that the spooler might need specific plugins for each
printer to correctly handle status codes.

--

For what it's worth, I've just released version 0.1.3 of my driver which
connects directly to the printer.  You need to set the queue to /dev/null as
with the ml85p but it works other than that.  I've also added a driver option
to let you specify the port.

I had a bit of trouble getting foomatic to recognize an option of type "string"
instead of "enum".  I noticed no other options are of type "string" - is this
unsupported?  At the moment, you can only choose from an enum of /dev/usb/lp0
through /dev/usb/lp15.

In any event, I think the driver is getting quite stable now.  Can I have my DB
entries added to the foomatic database so they appear on this website and in
future releases of foomatic?

There are more changes on the way (e.g. color support), but they may take me a
while to get these implemented and I'd like people to know there's a driver
available for the X125.

Thanks,
- Mark



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