This is a driver for certain types of Apple StyleWriter printers that works under various flavors of unix. It was originally developed under NetBSD-mac68k, and is reported to work under NetBSD-i386, Linux-i386, and recent versions of MkLinux-PPC and linux-pmac with some tweaking and/or the right cables. Note that the driver needs to talk to the printer (and vice-versa) at 57600 baud, so you may have trouble if your serial drivers are not quite ready for prime-time. I have heard that some beta versions of the mklinux 2.0 kernel don't deal well with baud rates this high. I have also heard at least one report that it does work on "recent" versions of linux-pmac. Caveat emptor, YMMV, etc, etc.
Version 0.9.9 of the driver package is available here. (This is a gzipped tar file, click here if you have trouble getting it.) Be sure to take a look at the README file (which is also included in the package) -- installation is non-trivial.
This version (0.9.9) contains the first pass at support for the Apple StyleWriter Ethernet Adapter. Details are in the file README.atalk in the distribution.
This version should work with the Color StyleWriter 2400 and 2500 (B&W or color), StyleWriter I, StyleWriter II, StyleWriter 1200, StyleWriter 2200, and StyleWriter 1500. If you have some other variant of StyleWriter, feel free to give it a try. I make no guarantees. If it doesn't work on your printer and you have email, some spare paper and lots of time on your hands (or live in the vicinity of Portland, OR, USA and want to loan it to me long enough to get it working), drop me a line and we'll see about adding support for it.
To make use of this driver, you will need to get some version of ghostscript. Pretty much any version will work; it's just used to generate a 360dpi bitmap in pbmraw, 'bit' or 'bitcmyk' format for the driver to print. Various versions are available from Gnu mirror sites and Aladdin. Last time I checked, only the Aladdin site had the latest major version (5.xx) -- versions on the gnu sites only go up to 3.something.
If you want to share a StyleWriter between machines running both MacOS and unix and the machines are networked together, versions 8.5.1 and up of the Apple LaserWriter driver for MacOS are capable of printing directly to an lpr queue, and thus to the GhostScript/StyleWriter setup. System software versions before 8.0 can use the 8.5.1 driver update, 8.0 users should get the System 8.1 update, which includes the new driver.
I frequently get email from people looking for a StyleWriter driver for Windows 95/NT. I've never seen one, and I have no intention of porting this driver (I don't do Windows), but anyone who wants to undertake a port is welcome to try. Please contact me before redistributing modified versions of this code.
Update June 16, 2003
It has been several years since I did anything with this code, but it appears that others have been busy. I recently ran across an article on macosxhints containing directions for setting this up on Mac OS X. It looks like the article is based on this page. Someone has even put together an installer that you can download here.
Please note that I had no involvement nor contact with any of these fine folks. I've never tried hooking a StyleWriter to a Mac OS X machine. It's great to see this old project still making itself useful, but please don't come to me for CUPS tech support.