no signs of life from printer

[Norbert Froese <nfroese@interchange.ubc.ca>]

Hi,

I recently installed Debian (potato) and am having trouble eliciting any
signs of life from my printer (EPSON Stylus COLOR 777 )

It is not a hardware/cable problem as all is well printing with Windows
( also installed )

Given a test file 'test'

lpr test (either as regular user or root ) gives no indication of error
but no activity from my printer

test > /dev/lp0 (as root ) also gives no indication of error but no
activity ( >/dev/lp1 or /lp2 give 'device not configured)

I have compiled parport and lp support into my kernel (2.4.4)

The relevant lines from dmesg are:

parport0: PC-style at 0x778 [PCSPP, TRISTATE]
parport0: cpp_daisy: aa5500ff(98)
parport0: assign_addrs: aa5500ff(98)
parport0: Printer, EPSON Stylus COLOR 777
lp0: using parport0 (polling)

It seems to me that my problem is more low level than a spooling or
filter problem as there is no activity, even with directly accessing the
printer.

I am unsure how to proceed to logically diagnose my problem

My resources are the printing how-to and Running Linux (O'Reilly)

Any advice on how to proceed or pointing to additional resources would
be appreciated.

TIA

Norbert