Printer Port

When you install a printer or later change its setup, you can specify the device, or the printer port, to which the printer is connected, by using Solaris Print Manager or the lpadmin -p printer-name -v device-name command.

Most systems have two serial ports and a parallel port. Unless you add ports, you cannot directly connect more than two serial printers and a parallel printer to one system.

With Solaris Print Manager, you can select either /dev/term/a or /dev/term/b, or choose Other and specify any port name that the print server recognizes. These options give you as much flexibility as the lpadmin command.

The LP print service initializes the printer port using the settings from the standard printer interface program. See "Managing Print Filters" for more information about printer interface programs. If you have a parallel printer or a serial printer for which the default settings do not work, see "Adjusting Printer Port Characteristics" for information about customizing the port settings.

If you use multiple ports on an IA based system, only the first port is enabled by default. The second and any subsequent ports are disabled by default. To use more than one port, you must manually edit the device driver port configuration file for each additional asy (serial) port or lp (parallel) port. The pathnames for the IA port configuration files are:

/platform/i86pc/kernel/drv/asy.conf

/platform/i86pc/kernel/drv/lp.conf

See the Solaris 8 (Intel Platform Edition) Device Configuration Guide for information about configuring serial and parallel ports on IA based systems.