Using OSX binary drivers under *nix

[Michael Sweet]

Stefan R. wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> I just came in here by reading this 
> http://ask.slashdot.org/askslashdot/05/04/19/1849215.shtml story. As
> far as I understood, (eg) the cheepo ink printers w/o linux (but OSX)
> support are driven by closed source printer filters in OSX which are
> called by cups. Since OSX's kernel source (Darwin) is availible to
> the public, wouldn't it be possible to do some kind of wrapper for
> these binary drivers such as ndiswrapper does it for win32 drivers?
> This would allow users of all unixes to benefit from the grown
> attention for osx in the consumer hardware area. I'm not a kernel or
> cups hacker, so maybe I'm completely wrong, but if it works that way
> I described, it would be a nice idea...

It is conceivable that you could do this on Linux PPC.  For other
CPUs you would have to emulate (too slow for raster drivers) or
convert (error-prone) the machine code to run on the local machine.

Then you have to support both Tioga and CUPS drivers; the Tioga
API is not open source, the CUPS API is...

In short, I don't think it is feasible.

-- 
______________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Easy Software Products           mike at easysw dot com
Internet Printing and Publishing Software        http://www.easysw.com