Ndis drivers for printers

newbiesforever · 01-25-2008, 11:57 AM

Is there any inherent reason (other than that nobody's gotten around to it yet) that Ndis or Ndis-like drivers couldn't be written for printers without native(right word?) Linux drivers? Would it be more difficult? It would be nice to eliminate the guesswork and the possibly imperfect printing that results from using similar-but-not-identical drivers.

MS3FGX · 01-25-2008, 12:27 PM

ndiswrapper technically works with any Windows driver, it is just designed for WLAN hardware. Some printers and other USB devices can be used with ndiswrapper, but for the most part the developers are concerned with trying to get the myriad of WiFi adapters out there working.

So if somebody was to fork ndiswrapper and start focusing on refining it's operation for non-WLAN devices, then sure you could do that. But printer support is not really so bad that you would see much benefit from such a project.

newbiesforever · 01-25-2008, 03:29 PM

That answers my questions. Thank you. By the way, what does "ndis" signify?

MS3FGX · 01-26-2008, 07:03 AM

Network Driver Interface Specification, it is an API developed by 3Com and Microsoft to standardize the way network devices talk to the kernel. Quite convenient for getting hardware supported on other OS's.

newbiesforever · 01-26-2008, 04:39 PM

That's surprising. I hadn't supposed Microsloth helped invent a device that could be very useful in Linux in running equipment optimized for Windows.