4]----------------------------------- 3]THE SHELL GAME: A Continuing Column 3]System Printer Utilities 3]By Brad Webb 4]----------------------------------- This month you'll learn about installing printers and the CMD utility. For some of the experimentation you'll need a CLI or Shell window. If you know how to get either of these on screen, skip on to the start of the tutorial. Otherwise, consider this: 3]IF YOU'RE NEW HERE The shell and the CLI are special windows. In these windows commands and programs are run by typing, rather than by using the mouse and icons as with the Workbench. The CLI is an older, more primitive version of the shell. In this column we concentrate on the newer shell window. We examine uses of the shell itself, utilities and programs you can run from the shell, and the shell's interactions with the familiar Workbench environment. This column provides tutorials and examples to make it easier to follow. You will find a shell icon on your Workbench 1.3 disk in the window that opens when you double-click on the disk icon. Double-click on the shell icon and you have a window in which you can type the exercises and experiments from this column. If you plan to do the exercises while reading this column, it's best you exit now, open a Shell window and return. If you have displayed this text by clicking on the ShellGame icon in the J: window, toggle between the text and the Shell window by alternately pressing ALT-N and ALT-M. Give it a try to see how easy it is. Please? Before working any exercises, be sure you have started your Amiga with a copy of an unmodified Workbench disk. 3]DUAL PERSONALITY In recent columns we've explored the dual nature of the Amiga by looking at the same commands and programs from both the Workbench and the Shell. This month we continue that theme by looking at two printer control programs from both environments. The programs are CMD and InstallPrinter. Both are found in the Utilities drawer (directory) of the Workbench disk. 3]INSTALLING A NEW PRINTER DRIVER InstallPrinter is a utility provided for the first time with Workbench 1.3. When 1.3 was released the suite of Workbench programs had grown so large it was difficult to include everything on one disk. Commodore's solution was to move some items from the Workbench disk to the Extras disk. Among the relocated items is the library of printer drivers. The InstallPrinter program was provided to allow you to select the driver needed for your particular needs and to move it to your Workbench disk. This avoided a filled disk filling caused by having all the drivers on every Workbench disk, when only one or two would be used by each owner. InstallPrinter is a script or "execute" file. It is a simple text file, like a letter, but consisting of AmigaDOS commands. When used with the Amiga's EXECUTE command, script files behave like a series of commands typed at the keyboard. Script files are generally used from the Shell, but there is a way to use them from the Workbench. When combined with a properly prepared icon and the Amiga's command XICON, script files can be used from the Workbench. Such an icon is provided for InstallPrinter in the Utilities drawer. 3]SQUEEZING IN ANOTHER DRIVER Workbench disks are full beasts, but there is room for another printer driver on them. We will work through some exercises showing how to use InstallPrinter from both the Workbench and Shell to add drivers to your boot disks. For these exercises be certain you have started your computer with a copy of a standard Workbench 1.3 or 1.3.2 disk. Do NOT use your original disk, in case something goes wrong. The instructions provided will work for both single- and multiple-disk drive systems but owners with only one floppy drive will have to do disk swapping when prompted. Open the Utilities drawer on your Workbench disk. Inside you will find the icon for InstallPrinter. If you double-click on that icon, it will guide you through the installation process. Go ahead and double-click on it. The Amiga will ask you to put your Extras 1.3 disk in any drive. It will then present you with a list of available printer drivers and ask you to enter the name of one. Here's a copy of the list you will see. Alphacom_Alphapro_101 Brother_HR-15XL CalComp_ColorMaster CalComp_ColorMaster2 Canon_PJ-1080A CBM_MPS1000 Diablo_630 Diablo_Advantage_D25 Diablo_C-150 EpsonQ EpsonXOld EpsonX[CBM_MPS-1250] Howtek_Pixelmaster HP_DeskJet HP_LaserJet HP_PaintJet HP_ThinkJet ImagewriterII Nec_Pinwriter Okidata_293I Okidata_92 Okimate_20 Quadram_QuadJet Qume_LetterPro_20 Toshiba_P351C Toshiba_P351SX Xerox_4020 You must enter the name exactly as shown in the list. For our exercise we will use the Diablo_630 printer driver. Enter the following: Diablo_630 InstallPrinter will copy the driver specified to the Workbench disk you used to start your computer. You can then use the Preferences program as described in the Amiga manual to select the new printer driver. I will briefly describe the process below. 3]FROM THE SHELL You have just seen how to use InstallPrinter from the Workbench. Let's see how to use it from the Shell. Make certain your Workbench disk is back in drive df0:, then open a Shell window. Enter the following command, which will remove the driver we just installed: delete devs:printers/Diablo_630 At your Shell prompt type the following command: execute sys:utilities/installprinter Once again the InstallPrinter program will run. Go ahead and use it to install the Diablo_630 driver again, just for practice's sake. Then delete it once again because I'm going to show you another way of installing printer drivers. (Now you know why I picked a driver with a relatively short name.) 3]USING AMIGADOS TO INSTALL PRINTER DRIVERS It isn't necessary to use the InstallPrinter program to make additional printer drivers available. You can do the job quite easily with AmigaDOS. There are very good reasons for knowing how to do so, as I will explain in a moment. We use the AmigaDOS command COPY to add printer drivers to the Workbench disk. We will copy the driver we want from the Extras 1.3 disk to a specific location on the Workbench disk. Every Workbench disk has a directory set aside just for printer drivers. Any driver we copy to this directory will be available to the Preferences program. The "full pathname" of the directory in question is Workbench1.3:devs/printers. Put your Workbench disk in drive df0: and Extras 1.3 in df1: (if you have one). Type the following command: copy "Extras 1.3:devs/printers/Diablo_630" to devs:printers/ Don't forget the quotes in the command above. They are needed because of the space in Extras 1.3. If you are using only one floppy drive, you'll be prompted for disk swaps as needed. Follow the on-screen prompts. The word devs: in the command is AmigaDOS shorthand that means "the devs directory of the disk used to start the computer." We are placing our copy in the devs directory's subdirectory called printers. The Amiga's operating system automatically looks for printer drivers in this directory. Once the copying is finished, double-click the Workbench 1.3 icon to open the Workbench window, if not already open. Next, double-click on the Preferences icon. In the Preferences window that opens, select the Change Printer gadget by clicking on it. Use the up and down arrows in the printer driver selection window and you should see the driver we just added among those listed. To select the new driver, use the up and down arrows until the drivername is highlighted in the center of the three lines. Click on the OK gadget to return to the main Preferences screen. Click on the Save gadget to make your selection permanent or on the Use gadget to have the selected driver used for the current computing session. The InstallPrinter program works well, but as we just learned, it may be just as easy to use the standard DOS COPY command. If you are unsure of the exact name of the printer driver you require, or if you want to list all the drivers available on your Extras 1.3 disk, the following command will tell you. Be certain Workbench 1.3 is in df0: and then type: dir "Extras 1.3:devs/printers" You should see the following: Alphacom_Alphapro_101 Brother_HR-15XL CalComp_ColorMaster CalComp_ColorMaster2 Canon_PJ-1080A CBM_MPS1000 Diablo_630 Diablo_Advantage_D25 Diablo_C-150 EpsonQ EpsonXOld EpsonX[CBM_MPS-1250] Howtek_Pixelmaster HP_DeskJet HP_LaserJet HP_PaintJet HP_ThinkJet ImagewriterII Nec_Pinwriter Okidata_293I Okidata_92 Okimate_20 Quadram_QuadJet Qume_LetterPro_20 Toshiba_P351C Toshiba_P351SX Xerox_4020 There is another good reason for knowing how to install a new printer driver with the AmigaDOS copy command rather than InstallPrinter. Not all printer drivers that can be used by your Amiga are on the Extras 1.3 disk. There are commercial and public domain disks with additional drivers on them. Most (if not all) must be installed with the COPY command rather than InstallPrinter. 3]SOMETHING TO BEWARE All this discussion of printer drivers was started by a letter from a reader. He wanted to know how to install a driver onto his copy of Deluxe Print. I answered him and explained the methods outlined here, but I had to issue a warning. You should know of this warning too. Not all programs use standard Amiga printer drivers. Some, like Deluxe Print, use their own printer drivers. These printer drivers are almost never compatible with any other programs. Furthermore, the standard Amiga printer drivers will not work with these programs. It does no good to copy a standard driver to such a program disk. If the program doesn't provide a special driver for your printer, you are simply out of luck. This is one reason most programs use the standard printer drivers. The programmers do not have to worry about writing drivers for many different printers, and you only need one driver for all the programs that use standard drivers. There will probably always be a few programs out there that, for one reason or another, rely on special drivers. The manuals that come with programs usually warn you if they do not use standard drivers. If you have an unusual printer, it is worth checking into every time you buy a program. 3]THE CMD PROGRAM What do you do if you wish to use a printer attached to a different Amiga than the one you are working on? Perhaps a friend has a laser printer that he will let you use now and again. If he has the same software you do, you can take your data files to his home and print them using his software, -- or drag your software along. The CMD program was designed to make using distant printers easier. CMD intercepts commands your software would ordinarily send to a printer and writes them in a special file. Later, you can take the disk with this file to your friend's computer, put it in his drive and COPY the file to his printer. It will act just as if your computer and software were driving it. How is this done? Like InstallPrinter, CMD can be used from both the Workbench and the Shell. We'll explore both methods. You can perform most of the following exercise even if you do not have access to a printer. I will warn you when you should stop. One other very important item. Be sure you first use the Preferences program to activate the printer driver for whatever printer will ultimately be doing the printing. If you have a parallel port printer, set Preferences to Parallel printouts for the rest of this experiment. Set it back to Serial before doing the COPY command shown below. To use CMD from the Workbench, open the Workbench window and then the Utilities drawer. Double-click on the CMD icon. The icon will remain highlighted but nothing else will seem to happen. Now, we run a program and obtain a printout. While the program thinks it is sending output to the printer, the CMD program will actually be intercepting everything. This is an excellent example of the Amiga's multitasking ability. CMD will create a file in the RAM: disk called "CMD_file". It will look as if nothing is happening until the "printout" is finished. Then CMD will pop up a small window telling you how much data it sent to the CMD_file, then pop up another small window telling you it is turning itself off. We will use the DOS command COPY for our experiment. Activate CMD from the Workbench if you haven't already done so. In the Shell type: copy s:startup-sequence to prt: . . . "copy to prt:" is the standard AmigaDOS way of printing a text file from disk. The startup-sequence in the s: directory is a simple text file. Now type the following command: dir ram: You should see the file CMD_file listed. This is the file that contains all the instructions COPY would ordinarily have sent to your printer. We must now copy this file to something more substantial than the RAM: device. With your Workbench disk back in drive df0: issue the command: copy ram:CMD_file to diskname: . . . where diskname is the name of a floppy disk with enough room to hold the file. 3]WARNING - YOU MAY BE GETTING OFF HERE If you do not have access to a printer, do not perform the remainder of this experiment. Otherwise, continue. Once the copying is complete, place Workbench back in drive df0: Now issue one of the following commands, which you would ordinarily do on the computer attached to the printer you wished to access. copy diskname:CMD_file to par: .. . or . . . copy diskname:CMD_file to ser: Use the first command if the printer is attached to the computer's parallel port and the second if it is attached to the serial port. Almost all Amiga printers attach to the parallel, or Centronics, port. We use the PAR: or SER: devices rather than the more common PRT: device for a very important reason. The PRT: device actually translates the output of your program into specific codes for the particular printer called out by your printer driver. CMD captures the information AFTER the translation. If we used the PRT: device with the COPY command at this point, the information would be translated twice and would probably not print at all. At this stage, your output should appear at the printer just as if your program were actually driving it (the COPY command in our experiment). If it didn't work, re-read the instructions above and have another go. Those of you without any printer attached to your computers should be able to use the method shown here to access a printer on a friend or co-worker's computer, even if it's another brand. I haven't actually tried it, but if the file CMD_file were copied to a floppy formatted for another brand of computer and then copied to the printer port on that computer, it should work just as well as when used on another Amiga. For example you could use Dos-2-Dos from Central Coast software or Cross Dos from Consultron to copy the CMD_file to an MS/DOS floppy. Placing that floppy in an MS/DOS computer and COPYing or TYPE-ing it to the appropriate COM port should let you print out on a printer attached to the MS/DOS machine. 3]FROM THE SHELL To use CMD from the shell, type: run cmd parallel filename . . . at a Shell prompt. If you have a serial printer you must change parallel to serial in this example. You can use anything as "filename" (even CMD_file for consistency's sake). Proceed as described above. CMD will create the file FILENAME with your printer commands in it. Give it a try with a different file, perhaps s:startupii. Note that we start the command with the word RUN so the current Shell can still be used after CMD starts. We must tell CMD whether to redirect the output of the parallel or serial port, and we must supply a filename for it so save its output in. While we're at it, type this in your Shell window: cmd ? Your Amiga will show you: CLI Usage Cmd v6.00: [run] Cmd devicename filename [opt i s m n] Type cmd help for more help This indicates there are options for the CMD command that we can use from the Shell. To see more about the options, type: cmd help CMD will respond: CLI Usage Cmd v6.00: [run] Cmd devicename filename [opt i s m n] devicename = serial or parallel i = ignore any file that starts with 4 nulls s = SKIP any short initial write (usually a reset if screendump) m = installed for MULTIPLE files until Break or CTRL_C n = enables NOTIFY (helpful progress messages) WB Tooltypes: DEVICE, FILE, and booleans SKIP,MULTIPLE,NOTIFY The options work as follows: -- The i option causes CMD to ignore a class of file that would not print correctly. If you use the m option to print several files in a row using CMD, and one or more fails, try this option. -- The s option should be tried if there's trouble getting CMD to work with screen dumps -- using a program that outputs a graphic representation of the screen to your printer. -- The m option lets you use CMD for more than one file at a time. -- The n option causes CMD to keep you informed as to how it is doing. We'll try an example using m and n ahead. The last line says you can use some of these options from Workbench. You would single-click on the CMD icon, then use the "info" option of the Workbench pulldown menu to gain access to the contents of the icon. Device lets you change from parallel to serial. CMD ordinarily uses the parallel port. File lets you change the name of the file from CMD_file. You could type SKIP, MULTIPLE or NOTIFY to activate the s, m or n options. These would be added to the tool types area of the icon, and the icon would be resaved. One item goes on each line and the up and down arrows are used to cycle from one to another. The format is "device=serial", "filename= CMDout", "skip (or multiple or notify)=true". Look at the existing CMD icon for clarification. We won't go into an exercise of icon modification here, because these options are much handier when used from the Shell. If you modify the icon, you must change it each time you wish to change the options in use. Most of the time, you will not want to use the options. 3]MULTIPLE FILES WITH CMD Let's see how to use CMD with more than one file. While we're at it, we'll use the NOTIFY option to keep ourselves informed. In your shell type: run cmd parallel ram:CMDout opt m n You will probably not get a prompt back after you press the RETURN key. If not, press it again. When the prompt returns type: copy s:startup-sequence to prt: You may have to press RETURN again to get a prompt. Now type: copy s:startupii to prt: After each copy CMD tells you how much information it copied and what the file name was. It made the first file CMDout.1 and automatically went to .2 for the second. We could continue as long as we wished with this process. Issue a "dir ram:" command to see your files. To remove CMD, type: status STATUS will report one or several lines. One will look like: Process 2: Loaded as command: cmd Make a note of the number (in our case 2). Type: break 2 all . . . substituting whatever process number CMD has in your computer. CMD will report by saying Cmd redirection of parallel.device removed You can verify that with another STATUS command. 3]UNTIL NEXT MONTH... That's all for this month. I hope this look at InstallPrinter and alternatives, and the CMD program will help you get more pleasure from an Amiga and printer combination. A reader's questions triggered this column, and yours might provide the impetus for a future one. If you have any topic you'd like to see me deal with here, please write me: Brad Webb, 321 N. Monroe St., Watertown, WI 53094 I'd be happy to hear from you. 4]END OF TEXT