Harry Palmer

The following step got an old Apple SCSI scanner working with my Ultra 5.

0. Download sane via blastwave

1. Setup the Sun generic SCSI Driver
# cd /kernel/drv
# vi sgen.conf
Make sure these two lines are valid
device-type-config-list=”processor”;
name=”sgen” class=”scsi” target=5 lun=0;

2. Stop (if required) and re-start the SCSI driver with new parameters

# modinfo |grep sgen
156 7beb6000 4678 151 1 sgen (SCSI generic driver 1.10)
# modunload -i 156
# devfsadm -v -i sgen

3. Set the SANE environment variable

# SANE_CONFIG_DIR=/opt/csw/etc/sane.d
# export SANE_CONFIG_DIR

4. Set Lib path (Not really sure if this is required)

# LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/csw/lib
# export LD_LIBRARY_PATH

5. Setup the SANE SCSI device

# vi /opt/csw/etc/sane.d/apple.conf
Edit as follows :-

scsi APPLE
/dev/scsi/scanner/c1t5d0

6. Test SANE

# ./sane-find-scanner

# sane-find-scanner will now attempt to detect your scanner. If the
# result is different from what you expected, first make sure your
# scanner is powered up and properly connected to your computer.

found SCSI scanner “APPLE SCANNER A9M0337 0.00″ at /dev/scsi/scanner/c1t5d0
# Your SCSI scanner was detected. It may or may not be supported by SANE. Try
# scanimage -L and read the backend’s manpage.

# No USB scanners found. If you expected something different, make sure that
# you have loaded a kernel driver for your USB host controller and have setup
# the USB system correctly. See man sane-usb for details.
# SANE has been built without libusb support. This may be a reason
# for not detecting USB scanners. Read README for more details.

# Not checking for parallel port scanners.

# Most Scanners connected to the parallel port or other proprietary ports
# can’t be detected by this program.

7. See if “Frontend” Application can see the driver and device (the “Backend” application)

# ./scanimage -L
device `apple:/dev/scsi/scanner/c1t5d0′ is a Apple SCANNER A9M0337 flatbed scanner
#

8. Launch frontend scanner GUI

# ./xscanimage

More information can be found here :-

http://www.sane-project.org/man/sane-apple.5.html

I bought a telescope new in Cash Converters a couple of weeks ago and last night I setup it up properly in the attic. I’d done a test in the back yard looking at the moon but wanted to have it inside over the winter, looking out through the velux window in the roof. After moving lots of things around there is now enough space to operate it but I need to find some kind of “pouf” to sit on as it’s very hard on the knees crouching to look through the eye piece.

It was a clear evening so without knowing what I was doing I started scanning the easterly sky. Quite by accident I found a very bright object which I think (after some research this morning) was the Andromeda galaxy! I have some night sky mapping software but it was too late to turn the computer back on to check.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda_Galaxy

For anyone wanting to add USB to an “older” Sun box which has PCI then it seems there are now very in-expensive cards around which work well. A google search turns up lots of advice about only using cards with NEC chipsets (e.g. from Adaptec or Belkin). However it seems that since Solaris 10 the VIA chipset in many other (cheaper) cards is also now supported.

Here’s the proof from http://www.motherboardpoint.com/t146825-adding-usb-to-and-ultra10.html

There are three basic interfaces for USB:

uhci – 1.x, not supported on SPARC until Solaris 10
ohci – 1.x, common to all architectures
ehci – 2.0, common to all architectures.

All chipsets are compatible with some or more of the above standards;
in a typical USB 2.0 configuration, there’s on USB 1.x uhci/ohci device
and one USB 2.0 ehci device per port.

In principle, all USB chipsets work but not all of them are robust.

E.g., on VIA chipsets below a certain revision, we’ll generally disable
USB 2.0 because it is not reliable (we allow you to reenable it).

People seem to have better luck with NEC.

Casper
–
Expressed in this posting are my opinions. They are in no way related
to opinions held by my employer, Sun Microsystems.
Statements on Sun products included here are not gospel and may
be fiction rather than truth.

The card I found in my local branch of MediaMarkt is a VIA based card from “Trust”. More well known for their cheap and nasty PC accessories but hey it works and for 19.99 euro you can’t really complain about the price. A boot -r and all appears to be working. I’ve just mounted an external USB hard disk and also mounted some PC floppies in a USB floppy drive from LaCie.

Some pictures of my recent upgrade of the Ultra 5s PSU
Ultra 5

I managed to get a HP LaserJet 5MP on loan from work for use when telecommuting. We have recently been upgraded from Dell Latitudes to IBM/Lenovo laptops but as these have no parallel port we were given Belkin USB to Centronics adapters.

I thought you might be interested to hear of my experiences setting it up at home. Rather that just connecting it directly to the work laptop I thought I would try and get it working with the USB port of my Airport Extreme wireless router so I can print from all the machines at home.

This actually works fine when printing from a Mac as the printer is discovered immeadatly via Apples Bonjour protocol. I then wanted to be able to print from my Ultra 5 and SGI Indy. After searching around it seems the Airport Extreme is able to receive raw print commands via a socket a la HP JetDirect.

I found the following procedure which works great, but be aware that for some reason the latest firmware update for the Airport Extreme changes the raw port from 9100 to 9101 (this was very frustrating!) :-

http://weblogs.java.net/blog/mhadley/archive/2006/01/printing_to_an.html

Printing to an Apple Airport Connected USB Printer from Solaris
Posted by mhadley on January 30, 2006 at 09:39 AM | Comments (0)

The first thing to do is work out the IP address of the Airport base station to which you’ve hooked up the printer. The Airport Admin utility on a Mac can help out here if you have multiple base stations but if you have only one then its likely to the same IP address that is your default gateway. To find the default gateway type (the # represents the shell prompt, don’t type it):

# netstat -rn
and look for the ‘default’ entry.

To make sure you’ve got the right IP address try:

# telnet ipaddr 9100
where ipaddr is the IP address of the base station. If telnet connects then you’re probably on the right track.

Next you need to configure a Solaris printer queue that points to the networked printer. It turns out that the Airport base station works pretty much the same as a HP JetDirect print server and the following commands get the job done:

# lpadmin -p hp -v /dev/null -m netstandard -o dest=airport:9100 -o protocol=tcp -o banner=never -T PS -I postscript
# enable hp
printer “hp” now enabled
# accept hp
destination “hp” now accepting requests
# lpadmin -d hp

where hp is the name of the printer queue and airport is the IP address or DNS name of the base station. The first line creates the queue, the second and third enable the queue and set it to accept requests and the final line sets this new queue to be the default printer queue. The first line will need adjusting if you are using anything other than a PostScript printer, the key parts of the command are use of tcp for protocol rather than bsd and using TCP port 9100 on the base station.

I’ve secretly always wanted to have console output being printed to a tractor feed printer using that cool fan fold paper with green stripes. Oh well this will have to do I guess. I think I was born twenty years too late to be a real system operator.