Author Topic: Anyone successfully using Brother HL-5470dw?  (Read 45013 times)

Dariusz Piatkowski

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Anyone successfully using Brother HL-5470dw?
« on: December 04, 2015, 05:17:04 am »
I've got my good 'ol trusty Brother HL-1650 (with NIC card, so really the same config as HL-1670) Postscript printer here, working very well with my OS/2 setup. Both the standard IBM as well as Alex's PSPRINT drivers support all the feature. However...the printer is aged and while I love it, the reality is that it's starting to show it's age.

With some of the sales around these past couple of weeks I spied the HL-5470dw unit...as the Brother (http://www.brother-usa.com/Printer/ModelDetail/1/HL5470DW/Overview) product page shows this is basically a modern day (updated) version of the HL-1670...still a Postscript printer, duplexed, fast not to mention it support Wi-Fi and the various types of Cloud/Google/Air printing (great for kids to run stuff off of their tablets).

So here is the big question: has anyone tried this unit in OS/2?

roberto

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Re: Anyone successfully using Brother HL-5470dw?
« Reply #1 on: December 05, 2015, 09:31:16 am »
If the printer supports PostScript 3, you can search the file printer drivers either Windows or Linux. Looking for the xxxxxxx.PPD file. With this file you move to your OS2, and the utility to import driver Alex, you can have a proper driver for your printer the OS2. That will allow you to use all the features of your printer.
This is true for any manufacturer, HP, Xerox, etc. not only for Brother.
I have come to hate cups, although work.
If you need assistance in the import, question.
Saludos

Paul Smedley

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Re: Anyone successfully using Brother HL-5470dw?
« Reply #2 on: December 05, 2015, 10:57:57 am »
I have come to hate cups, although work.

Care to elaborate more on this?

ak120

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Re: Anyone successfully using Brother HL-5470dw?
« Reply #3 on: December 05, 2015, 03:53:42 pm »
CUPS is great for networks with UNIX, but overdosed and oversized for small OS/2 based LAN systems. There's almost no existing documentation for OS/2 port (sometimes called eCups). If you have some idea of a real-life version of cups for OS/2 including useful OS/2 amd DOS/Win-OS/2 application support, working lpr or line printers on local parallel and serial ports.

roberto

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Re: Anyone successfully using Brother HL-5470dw?
« Reply #4 on: December 05, 2015, 06:24:18 pm »

Care to elaborate more on this?
First of all, thank you very much for your great work.
I can not say that cups in the future will not be necessary. But as a user, if I can choose to use cups, or using its own driver OS2, I prefer to use the OS2 driver.
Formerly a laser color printer with PostScript 3, cost 3000 euros, now less than 300 euros.
I have used in my cups work with inkjet, since the beginning of cups, and provided only 3 teams, I have come to hate. For hours I had to spend to make it work. And calls from users complaining that not print me. Usually the problem was not cups, was the user and the peculiarities of cups.
saludos

Joseph M. Kempf

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Re: Anyone successfully using Brother HL-5470dw?
« Reply #5 on: December 06, 2015, 02:30:27 am »
I would expect Brother's Postscript drive to work, if it is properly imported into OS/2-eCS by way of instprn.  I was able to so use Brother's  Windows version of its postscript drivers (*.PPD) to print in eCS on Brother's HL-3070CND, HL-4070CDW and MFC-L8850CDW.  Note that I had to clean and import it into eCS with instprn.  I could not get the CUPS Linux version of the Brother's PPD to work however.

Neil Waldhauer

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Re: Anyone successfully using Brother HL-5470dw?
« Reply #6 on: December 06, 2015, 02:55:29 am »
Since Alex Taylor's manage printers is available, running eCups is no problem for me. However, the OP printer, Brother HL-5470dw is not currently listed.

Is my cups installation out of date?

Neil
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http://www.blondeguy.com

Paul Smedley

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Re: Anyone successfully using Brother HL-5470dw?
« Reply #7 on: December 06, 2015, 03:11:16 am »
Hi Andreas,

CUPS is great for networks with UNIX, but overdosed and oversized for small OS/2 based LAN systems. There's almost no existing documentation for OS/2 port (sometimes called eCups). If you have some idea of a real-life version of cups for OS/2 including useful OS/2 amd DOS/Win-OS/2 application support, working lpr or line printers on local parallel and serial ports.

I don't really see what CUPS has to do with networks. Yes, it can be used to share printers from a central server, but it's also the printing system used on just about every modern linux client, as well as for MacOS....

ak120

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Re: Anyone successfully using Brother HL-5470dw?
« Reply #8 on: December 06, 2015, 12:10:23 pm »
CUPS for OS/2 relies on TCP/IP and at least a HPFS file system. For a non-networked small footprint OS/2 system that means additional 50 megabytes of wasted space at system's partition. When installed from WPI archives which seems to be recommended by eCups webpage the size of installed files (cups, driver, ghostscript) uses over 100 megabytes totally. This is also caused by packaging and it could be reduced by over 43 mb. I don't think that average users will need all header files and import libraries for printing. Why this packages have to include all this not accessable documentation (manpages, odt-files) and almost useless localisations?

Btw. good old MacOS doesn't use CUPS at all. I have to use it here (with dogcow of course) for Adobe Acrobat and Aldus Freehand, which were unfortunately never available under native OS/2.

Pete

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Re: Anyone successfully using Brother HL-5470dw?
« Reply #9 on: December 06, 2015, 06:25:26 pm »
Hi Andreas

How many of the drivers installed to [BootDrive]:\OS2\BOOT do you use? Most of us only use a few but the installer puts every driver that may be needed. Is that just in case we change hardware configuration in the future?

Just trying to draw a comparison with cups...

You could possibly go through the cups installation and remove unneeded files eg man pages but be careful you do not remove something you later need.

There is a man reader somewhere, possibly hobbes, but the online docs do the same job.

Does cups need tcpip to print locally?
I don't think so but it is a long time since I last had a local printer I may be wrong.

You may need a [BootDrive]:\tcip\bin directory to put the cupslpr.exe file into but there is nothing stopping a user from creating that directory on a non-tcpip-installed system and adding it to the config.sys PATH.

OTOH: you could probably install this file to another directory in the config.sys PATH - I am not sure if it is "hard coded" to BootDrive]:\tcip\bin.

Of course, if you do not have tcpip installed you probably do not have a browser installed which means no using the cups browser interface to setup and test your printer. That means playing "command line cowboy" with all those commands that I have forgotten...

A Mac that does not use cups... Must be Ye Olde Apple Mac  :-) pre-PC hardware and pre-linux?

Out of interest how old is the hardware running OS/2? I ask because it sounds like you may have disk space limitations in these days of Tb sized drives.


Regards

Pete







ak120

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Re: Anyone successfully using Brother HL-5470dw?
« Reply #10 on: December 08, 2015, 07:31:34 pm »
How many of the drivers installed to [BootDrive]:\OS2\BOOT do you use? Most of us only use a few but the installer puts every driver that may be needed. Is that just in case we change hardware configuration in the future?

Just trying to draw a comparison with cups...

Maybe 10 to 20 % of them. But this directory contains only 3 or 4 megabytes to draw a comparsion. Usually I delete not necessary device drivers for microchannel systems by a small REXX procedure after a finished installation.

Quote
You could possibly go through the cups installation and remove unneeded files eg man pages but be careful you do not remove something you later need.

There is a man reader somewhere, possibly hobbes, but the online docs do the same job.

A large part of documentation is only useful for developers or administrators. I doubt that average and users are able to install and use man page viewers under OS/2. Of course there's cawf as a small solution for command line paging, but it has some limitations. I never complained about man pages with XFree86/2 but there it was working almost out of the box by xman. Even the developers doing the port seem to hate man pages, otherwise they would convert them automatically to INF-files at time of the build.

Quote
Does cups need tcpip to print locally?
I don't think so but it is a long time since I last had a local printer I may be wrong.

All included executables and DLL is dynamically linked against TCPIP32.DLL. It becomes much worse for printers connected through serial and parallel ports. Then you have to run additionally a local LP daemon.

Quote
You may need a [BootDrive]:\tcip\bin directory to put the cupslpr.exe file into but there is nothing stopping a user from creating that directory on a non-tcpip-installed system and adding it to the config.sys PATH.

OTOH: you could probably install this file to another directory in the config.sys PATH - I am not sure if it is "hard coded" to BootDrive]:\tcip\bin.

Of course paths are hardcoded. But I'm aware of it. But documentation is not very friendly to end users in this area.

Quote
Of course, if you do not have tcpip installed you probably do not have a browser installed which means no using the cups browser interface to setup and test your printer. That means playing "command line cowboy" with all those commands that I have forgotten...

Because CUPSD also includes an integrated web server etc. it's not possible at all. But again, probaly nobody tested the command line tools. The included localization files (which use GNU gettext?) are in UTF-8, so it looks like garbage on non-english systems and causes additional headache.

Quote
A Mac that does not use cups... Must be Ye Olde Apple Mac  :-) pre-PC hardware and pre-linux?

It's a PowerMac G4, one of last ones that are able to run native MacOS 9. Ok, I could also use Snow Leopard which still included Rosetta emulation on newer devices. But that's too much effort for just running FreeHand and Acrobat.

Quote
Out of interest how old is the hardware running OS/2? I ask because it sounds like you may have disk space limitations in these days of Tb sized drives.

They were mostly control devices at ages from 0 to 15 years. I don't know any reliable backup and restore solution for stand-alone systems that could handle Tb sizes nowadays under OS/2. So some of the devices only contain only CF cards that have to contain everything and were connected to process printers or barcode devices. Not everybody wants to pay extra money for connected industrial ethernet stuff.

For development and administration workstations it's not a big problem to have more storage space for printing system (than for the base OS itself) available. But on production systems it will increase (doubles) downtimes for creating backups of a system partition.

To make it clear, here is no hostility against people who tried to make CUPS working under OS/2. But to make it ready for an end user it's a long way to go.

Pete

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Re: Anyone successfully using Brother HL-5470dw?
« Reply #11 on: December 08, 2015, 08:13:59 pm »
Hi Andreas

You may want to contact those more directly involved with cups, Paul and Alex, to see if it is possible to "customise" a cups installation to your precise requirements.

I do not know if it can be done or how long it could take but think that it would be worthy of a reasonable size "donation" in respect of time and effort if either of them can sort cups to your requirements.


Regards

Pete


Dariusz Piatkowski

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Re: Anyone successfully using Brother HL-5470dw?
« Reply #12 on: February 06, 2016, 01:55:10 am »
Guys!!!

Great news...I was a little delayed in getting this through, but I finally managed to pick up the printer locally (Staples Canada matched the on-line sales price, thumbs-up to them).

Anyways, glad to report the printer is chugging along quite nicely. So after I extracted the PPD file from the Win version of the driver package I proceeded with the import using Alex's drivers (PSPRINT 30.905). No errors were encountered, I then setup a new SLPR port and off I went.

All current apps readily print w/o any problems. The printer is a speedy little thing, at least as compared to my HL1650 machine. The Postscript options listed in Windows are all recognized by the OS/2 driver.

OK, so all good news....BUUUUTTTT....there is always a "but" right? LOL

Well, not all that bad of a "but", rather a simple definition of a printer control. So the 5470dw printer driver moves the "Resolution" settings to the "Features" tab of the driver settings. No big deal, I can still access them and as I make the changes I see that the printed output matches. However, my HL1650 shows the resolution controls in the "Output" tab. So at least from my liking perspective I would like to maintain this. Now from the "will it work elsewhere" perspective (and I have no idea if there is some sort of dependency here or not) I am worried that the only option in the 5470dw is 600dpi and therefore if an application is actually looking for the printer resolution capability it may in fact force 600dpi print output.

Looking at the PPD files here is how the HL1650 and 5470dw drivers differ:

1) HL1650

*%%%%% Resolution and Appearance Control %%%%%
*OpenUI *Resolution: PickOne
*OrderDependency: 11 AnySetup *Resolution
*DefaultResolution: 600dpi
*Resolution   300dpi: "<</HWResolution [300 300] >> setpagedevice"
*Resolution   600dpi: "<</HWResolution [600 600] >> setpagedevice"
*Resolution   1200dpi: "<</HWResolution [1200 1200] >> setpagedevice"
*CloseUI: *Resolution

2) 5470dw

*%%%%% Resolution and Appearance Control %%%%%
*DefaultResolution: 600dpi
*OpenUI *CAPT/Print Quality:PickOne
*OrderDependency: 10 AnySetup *CAPT
*DefaultCAPT: Middle
*CAPT   SFine/1200 dpi: "<</HWResolution [1200 1200] >> setpagedevice
statusdict/true1200 known{statusdict begin true true1200 end}if
"
*CAPT   Fine/HQ 1200: "<</HWResolution [1200 1200] >> setpagedevice
statusdict/true1200 known{statusdict begin false true1200 end}if
"
*CAPT   Middle/600 dpi: "<</HWResolution [600 600] >> setpagedevice"
*CAPT Low/300 dpi: "<</HWResolution [300 300] >> setpagedevice"
*CloseUI: *CAPT

I have not looked up any Postscript references yet to see if I can actually move my 5470dw "CAPT" settings over to the "Resolution" definition, but both printers claim to support Postscript 1.3, therefore I have no reason to suspect that the 5470dw PPD could not be successfully re-written to move the options to the "Resolution" definition.

If anyone has some input on this I'd love to see them. I will most likely give this a try over the weekend.

roberto

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Re: Anyone successfully using Brother HL-5470dw?
« Reply #13 on: February 06, 2016, 09:57:01 am »
Hello
The linux driver show this for this printer:
Code: [Select]
*%%%%% Resolution and Appearance Control %%%%%
*OpenUI *Resolution: PickOne
*OrderDependency: 11 AnySetup *Resolution
*DefaultResolution: 600dpi
*Resolution 300dpi: "                      "
*Resolution 600dpi: "                      "
*Resolution 2400x600dpi/HQ1200dpi: "                    "
*Resolution 1200dpi: "                    "
*CloseUI: *Resolution
The difference is in 1200x1200 do not exits, but you have 2400x600 = 1200

I send you the linux cups ppd file for this priinter, you can test it, to import.
Saludos

Dariusz Piatkowski

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Re: Anyone successfully using Brother HL-5470dw?
« Reply #14 on: February 07, 2016, 06:10:00 am »
So I took Roberto's Linux/cups based PPD and re-fitted the Brother PPD with the *Resolution section, I preserved the 'setpagedevice' settings from the Brother drivers:

=== START ===
*%%%%% Resolution and Appearance Control %%%%%
*OpenUI *Resolution: PickOne
*OrderDependency: 11 AnySetup *Resolution
*DefaultResolution: 600dpi
*Resolution   300dpi: "<</HWResolution [300 300] >> setpagedevice"
*Resolution   600dpi: "<</HWResolution [600 600] >> setpagedevice"
*Resolution   HQ1200dpi: "<</HWResolution [1200 1200] >> setpagedevice
statusdict/true1200 known{statusdict begin false true1200 end}if
"
*Resolution   1200dpi: "<</HWResolution [1200 1200] >> setpagedevice
statusdict/true1200 known{statusdict begin true true1200 end}if
"
*CloseUI: *Resolution
=== END ===

However....somewhat strangely enough, I am getting the following error out of PIN.EXE:

=== START ===
[G:\TEST\PSCRIPT]pin ppd \test\pscript\5470 \test\pscript\5470
PostScript resource packaging utility version 1.00
Copyright (c) IBM Corp. 2000,2001. All rights reserved.

Producing Printer Device PAK
reading driver extended attributes
  fail
SYS0005: Access is denied.

fail
=== END ===

Almost looks like the PSCRIPT.DRV file is throwing the 'Access is denied' error...is this some kind of OS/2 built in protection mechanism on the PSSCRIPT.DRV file??? I copied a fresh ZIP of the PSCRIPT 30.800 driver to my test directory so as to avoid any issues attempting to update the existing driver in \os2\dll\pscript.