WORKING - Panasonic KX-P1180 B/W Dot Matrix

[starhawk]

Just wanted to mention that my 1989 (!) Panasonic KXC-P1180 dot matrix works great in Slacko 570 non-PAE (I *think* it's the non-PAE one... remind me how you check that?).

Booted that Pup on a nearly stock HP t5630W thin client (only butchering I've done so far is to give it 2gb RAM instead of 1gb...) with the Panasonic plugged into the parallel port.

Two things to know about this printer --

(1) Old printers like the Panasonic are often compatible, driver-wise, with /other/ old printers. In this case, the compatibility is Epson's FX-800 or FX-86e -- both of which use the Epson 9-Pin driver built into CUPS. Whee.

(2) It does need a real actual physical parallel port to work -- I couldn't make it behave with my USB->Centronics adapter (which has a fully supported PL-2305 chipset, rather than the USB->LPT adapter I have that uses some QinHeng thing called a CH340 which is very weird -- it's a COMport *and* LPTport chip, but the Linux driver only does the serial half...). It just didn't want to work and I got tired of poking with it. Would've been extra funny getting the printer to play nice with my i5 laptop, but such was not to be...

(3) I have a very strange idea of 'fun'. Getting a late-80s loud-as-a-Metallica-concert screechy dusty and tanned dot matrix printer to work with a modern Linux distro on a reasonably modern computer is fun to me I probably ought to have that checked, lol...

Ah yes, the joys of tractor-fed paper and a print resolution so low you can count the DPI with your finger ... hey, does anyone (other than Costco or other retail outlets) still use these old heap printers for anything...? I got mine (for a fiver!) to keep my old 386 company... in other words, nostalgia...

[6502coder]

That info might come in handy one day...I have a KX-1080P (I think) stored away somewhere that I used with an Atari 800 and a Commodore Amiga back in the day. By the time I retired it, it was already darn near impossible to find ribbon cartridges for it -- I can't imagine where you'd find any nowadays!

[Keisha]

Interesting thread, so I'm posting here to bookmark it. Maybe someday I'll try that 1994 KX-P2124 printer still lurking in my garage...

[8-bit]

I used that printer to print 3 part carbonless forms that were custom shipping manifests for a company I had at one time.
And trying to print multiple part forms with an inkjet or lazer printer just does not work. Tractor feed dot matrix printers are still used by a lot of businesses.

[starhawk]

6502coder -- your manual is here. (I found it and uploaded it.) You would use the same Epson 9-Pin driver that I did, and you will very likely need a real honest-to-goodness hardware parallel port.

Keisha -- your manual is here. Yours is a 24-pin printer, and the driver you want is /almost/ certainly the Epson 24-Pin driver, rather than the 9-Pin. If that driver doesn't work, look for an Epson LQ driver... good luck...

[Cladnn]

Couldn't get my kx-p1180 to work on Ubuntu 14.04. But thanks to your post, I fired up Slacko 5.7.0 pae and it prints like a charm using the Epson driver -- which is nice 'cause I got about 10 lbs of fanfold paper from the thrift store for 2 dollars.

Slacko also works as a print server so I can print from my daily driver computer.

Thanks.

[infromthepound]

I'm sure you can still buy new dot matrix printers - (Oki?), though they are very expensive.
There is a use for them where NCR type forms are used.
We legally had to keep hard copies of results for 20 years where I worked and used this type of printer.
I suspect the older results have been eaten by insects by now..
JB

[8Geee]

I am in awe. 1989 printer on Slacko5.7-nonpae. Headphones not included