Just some light Sunday afternoon entertainment: Printing from NetBSD on the dotmatrix printer by dumping data to /dev/ulpt0. The netbook doesn’t have a parallel port, so this must be done over USB. NetBSD.escp was created by a little custom ESC/P converter written in C. 🥳

https://movq.de/v/14b09c47a5/print-small.mp4

Video description:

Video begins with a view of the netbook’s screen: 3 windows are open, one of them showing the typical NetBSD logo to print, the other one shows the commands I ran in preparation:

magick /usr/X11R7/include/X11/pixmaps/NetBSD.xpm -depth 8 -alpha set /tmp/NetBSD.pam
./pam2escp /tmp/NetBSD.pam /tmp/NetBSD.escp

The other terminal shows a root shell with this command:

cat /tmp/NetBSD.escp >/dev/ulpt0

I hit Enter, the printer starts printing.

Camera pans to show the printer, an Oki ML 3390. Continuous paper. Once finished, I manually feed the paper a little bit to better show the result.

(If you turn up the volume enough, you can hear “Leaving” by “Chill Carrier” from 2008.)