[9fans] Re: iPAQ printing

[Digby Tarvin <digbyt@dircon.co.uk>]

Hello Dale,

My impression so far is that the ipaq is neat hardware that is still
waiting for some suitable software to run on it.

I gave up on WinCE after a few days, concluding that it was vastly inferior
to my old Psion EPOCH O/S and didn't seem to attempt to work as an
independent computer. Everything seemed to revolve around the assumption
that you would have ready access to a desktop machine and would only
work offline for brief periods :-/

I have loaded up Linux which is much more interesting, but really only
at the 'some assembly required' stage.  As soon as I sort out a
viable LAN and get some native compilers going it will definately
beat the pants off WinCE though.....

I am, however, most optimistic about the prospects for Plan9 or
Inferno - both of which are actively being developed for IPAQ,
and are far more modern, elegant and efficient than WinCE or even
Linux.  (I think they currently assume a wireless lan with access to
a separate file server)

These too are still not quite ready for the general masses, but Compaq
have done the right thing in making adequate hardware docs available,
so I am confident that the IPAQ will become a useful tool...

Just a pity Compaq had to waste so much of their resources following
the Microsft bandwagon rather than putting a useful OS on it to start
with....

Regards,
DigbyT

P.S. in answer to your original question - no, I did not get any
suggestions regarding printing from WinCE. And when I pointed
my IPAQ at my HP Laserjet, I didn't get the slightest hint of any
recognition, so you got further than I did. Perhaps your IPAQ was
running newer firmware?

But if WinCE needs third party software to actually print a file,
it doesn't sound like something worth wasting time on to me.

>Hello
>
>I am wondering whether anyone gave you any good advice on printing from your
>iPAQ.  I just bought one and figured it's got a beam function, so why not
>print?  I held it up to an HP 6P printer with an infrared and the light on
>the printer started flashing, the iPAQ showed that it had encountered a
>printer and even gave the correct name- then nothing.  I got a "failed"
>message.
>
>Tech support at Compaq said it won't print that way until some 3rd party
>comes up with printing software.  A hand held computer running a word
>processor that won't print?  Seems like an oversight to me.
>
>Anyway, I hope you had better luck than I did finding a solution.
>
>Dale Hubert