[Coco] Coco and Modern Printers

[Aaron Wolfe]

>
> Frank:
>
>         The Raspberry Pi should run the Linux version of Drivewire 3 with no
> problem. It has printer support. (Might be possible to run Drivewire 4,
> depends on RPi's Java capabilities.)
>
>         A credit card sized Drivewire Server!!
>
>         That's one of the first things mine is going to do (if it ever gets
> here!).
>
> --
> Christopher R. Hawks


The DW4 server runs very well on the Raspberry Pi.  Actually it runs
fine on much, much more limited devices such as the Linksys NSLU2 (a
device with a 133mhz arm cpu and 32mb ram, compared to the Pi's
700mhz/modern cpu and 256mb).   You can also run cups and/or whatever
printer stuff you need to talk to whichever printer you'd like to use
on the little guy, so its very well suited for tasks like this.

DW4 emulates an epson FX80 (partially) to render dot matrix output as
an image or will create plain text output.   You can specify arbitrary
commands for the server to invoke after an output file is created (and
pass them the name of that file).  This makes it easy to do things
like Gene has set up.. in a nutshell you print on the coco like normal
and it comes out of your modern printer like normal, all
automagically.

It would be difficult to build anything for $35 that could work nearly
so nicely for printing alone, much less all the other things DW4 can
do and all the other things the Pi can do.