Question:

I need to install two versions of the same printer driver. Is this possible?

Answer:

It is interesting that you should ask this. Mr. KIA was asked this question elsewhere several months ago. Then, less than a month later Mr. KIA had just this requirement. Current versions of the OMNI driver do not support printing single copies of small pin-feed forms while older versions support this option correctly. Mr. KIA needed to print forms like this but did not want to give up the features of the newer OMNI drivers.

As you already know, you can't just rename the driver DLL file and install the driver. This does not work because the driver name is hardcoded within several of the files. Editing the visible occurrences of the hardcoded name is also not quite sufficient. The key to a working solution is to realize that there are also hardcoded references to the driver name stored in the Extended Attributes (EAs) of the driver DLL file. Once you know this, the rest is easy.

The procedure is:

• Rename the driver DLL file. This is the file with the .drv extension. The new name must be the same length as the original name. This restriction is due to how OS/2 constructs DLLs.
• Detach the extended attributes from the driver DLL with:

    eautil xxxx.drv tmp.ea /s
  

  where xxxx.drv is the name of the driver DLL. This will store the EAs in the file tmp.ea.
• Using your favorite binary file editor search the driver files and tmp.ea and replace every reference to the original driver name with the new name. Mr. KIA finds that ZtBold makes this kind of task easy. It can do the searching and the editing with a minimal number of keystrokes. When replacing references, preserve the original case. Only a subset of the references require this. However, it's easier to preserve the original case everywhere rather than trying to figure out when it really matters.
• Reattach the extended attributes to the driver DLL with:

    eautil xxxx.drv tmp.ea /j
  

That's it. Install the driver and happy printing.

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