I've got some old programs running nicely in DOSEMU that expect to be printing to LPT1 and/or LPT2. In addition, I've got a few old binary-only programs in Linux that equally expect to print to LPT1 and LPT2.

Problem is that on my new laptop there is no LPT ports, and I was hoping there might be a way to emulate the LPT ports and redirect that traffic to the networked printer, or worst case capture it and send it to a USB-port instead?

Anyone with experience on this subject?

-Y1

According to the docs, the default dosemu config should redirect printing to the LPT1 port to a "lpr" printing command in Linux. Just make sure a default printer is setup in CUPS.
Did this info help? http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO...WTO.html#ss4.8

Eric

Thanks for quick reply.

I guess what I'm looking for is some sort of combination. The old DOS program expects to connect directly to the printer, as it sends ESCape codes in PCL to the printer. Thus it'll be ruined if I do as the FAQ and dosemu docs say and just redirect LPT1 to default printer.

Furthermore, doing direct passthrough as also described is of little help as new computers very rarely have such physical ports.

So what I was hoping is to combine the two, that I set DOSEMU to print to LPT1 which is capured and sent to a CUPS-printer called RAW for instance, and then that one sends the data un-filtered on to the printer itself, so that the ESCape codes for PCL and others arrive un-hindered.

Is something like this achievable, or should we really look to retire the old DOS programmes once and for all?

(I finally got my father to switch from DOS to Linux - he's over 70, has refused Windows on his computers since Windows95, and is now finally convinced that Slackware+dosemu is the way to go as he can keep his plethora of old DOS tools... come to think of it - how many others do you know who have been in the IT business since PDP-11 and CP/M, but skipped the step to Windows )

-Y1