Kurts Blog of Photography, minicomputers, mainframes, lightwave communications, and just whatever.

So, for a few months now, I've been trying to get CUPS (print driver) working correctly under raspbian. These are the issues I'm having: CUPS sends output to the printer, but several of the first lines are missing from the printout. The source file looks just fine. CUPS has specific drivers for the printer I'm using. I've installed these, and they work. But - The fonts used for the print driver are so horrible to look at, they are completly useless. God awful to look at. CANNOT BE DESCRIBED JUST HOW GOD DAMNED UGLY THEY ARE. And the printout still misses the first few lines of the file output. I'm guessing the pre-pubecsent teen that wrote the fonts and driver had never seen a printer before. Opened a ticket with debian about the problems of missing lines. After a few e-mail exchanges, we decided that debian doesn't care and won't care in the future. Maybe he was the author of the GOD AWFUL font set. Never had this problem with Slackware..

This post is a little different. It shows a typical login session on the PMC-20. You start by connecting via a ssh session: Workstation1:~ $ ssh kurt@pmc20 kurt@pmc20's password: Last login: Fri Jan 26 16:24:37 2018 from pi1   #     # ######  #######     #######  #####   #####   ##   ## #     # #           #     # #     # #     #   # # # # #     # #           #     # #             #   #  #  # ######  #####       #     #  #####   #####   #     # #       #           #     #       #       #   #     # #       #           #     # #     # #     #   #     # #       #######     #######  #####   #####       --- Welcome to MPE on the PMC-20 --- To view available commands type 'commands' at the prompt. For command help, type 'help [command]', or just 'help'. You will be logged out after 20 minutes of inactivity. Assigned JOB number 114 ~/kurt> commands *** MPE Built-in Commands *** cd               change directories help             show this help file exit 

A few notes on my mini computer. I re-wrote MPE (the user shell/commands/accounting system) on and off over the last few months. MPE is now version 3.02. I’ve added a lot of user programs and added features to the utilities I already completed. I’m finishing up a line editor that’s somewhere between ED for the pdp-8 and TECO. All the user utils  (cd, copy, attach, type etc) are multi-user safe and as optimized as I can make them. I found out about the Linux kernel  atime bug that breaks some of my system monitor stuff. Too bad the kernel devs want to keep it broken. Oh, well. I made a file system change that made a 200% speed up to the user experience. Very happy with that. I wrote a couple drivers for low speed and high speed paper tape readers. I wrote a tape drive driver. I can’t find my 500 mb tape drive so I emulated one using sequential files on various media. Really happy with it - I can type “tape save” and save versions of software in seconds. Lots faster than reel