At this point you probably do not have the printer working,
so here is a way to create a file from a manual page, move it to a
floppy, and then print it from DOS. Suppose you want to read
carefully about changing permissions on files (pretty
important). You can use man chmod
to read
about it. The command
%
man chmod | col -b > chmod.txt
will remove formatting codes and send the manual page to the
chmod.txt
file instead of showing it on
your screen. Now put a dos-formatted diskette in your floppy
drive a
, su
to root
, and type
#
/sbin/mount -t msdosfs /dev/fd0 /mnt
to mount the floppy drive on
/mnt
.
Now (you no longer need to be root
, and you can type
exit
to get back to being user jack) you can
go to the directory where you created
chmod.txt
and copy the file to the floppy
with:
%
cp chmod.txt /mnt
and use ls /mnt
to get a directory
listing of /mnt
, which should show the file
chmod.txt
.
You might especially want to make a file from
/sbin/dmesg
by typing
%
/sbin/dmesg > dmesg.txt
and copying dmesg.txt
to the floppy.
/sbin/dmesg
is the boot log record, and it is
useful to understand it because it shows what FreeBSD found when
it booted up. If you ask questions on the FreeBSD general questions mailing list or on a USENET
group—like “FreeBSD is not finding my tape drive,
what do I do?”—people will want to know what
dmesg
has to say.
You can now unmount the floppy drive (as root
) to get the
disk out with
#
/sbin/umount /mnt
and reboot to go to DOS. Copy these files to a DOS
directory, call them up with DOS EDIT, Windows® Notepad or
Wordpad, or a word processor, make a minor change so the file
has to be saved, and print as you normally would from DOS or
Windows. Hope it works! Manual pages come out best if printed
with the DOS print
command. (Copying files
from FreeBSD to a mounted DOS partition is in some cases still a
little risky.)
Getting the printer printing from FreeBSD involves creating
an appropriate entry in /etc/printcap
and
creating a matching spool directory in
/var/spool/output
. If your printer is on
lpt0 (what DOS calls
LPT1), you may only need to go to
/var/spool/output
and (as root
) create the
directory lpd
by typing: mkdir
lpd
, if it does not already exist. Then the printer
should respond if it is turned on when the system is booted, and
lp
or lpr
should send a
file to the printer. Whether or not the file actually prints
depends on configuring it, which is covered in the FreeBSD
handbook.
This, and other documents, can be downloaded from http://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/doc/
For questions about FreeBSD, read the
documentation before
contacting <questions@FreeBSD.org>.
For questions about this documentation, e-mail <doc@FreeBSD.org>.