Re: Printer woes
On Thu, 31 May 2001, Andrew D Dixon wrote:
>
> Sidney Brooks wrote:
> >
> >
> > Can anybody tell me what is wrong?
> >
Try cat foo.txt > /dev/lp0 (or lp1) as root. If you still get a 'no such device' error, look at dmesg (dmesg |less is the easiest). You should see boot messages about your printer. If you don't see any boot messages, you may not have it compiled into your kernel. If you do see boot messages about your printer but still cannot cat to it, you may have to assign manual settings to the port at boot time. Ordinarily, the parallel port is assigned a "polling" status, that is, it doesn't take an assigned IRQ under linux. This is just a CPU overhead issue, and it works just as efficiently if you manually assign an IRQ (sometimes faster, actually, depending on the printer). You can assign an IRQ and DMA by adding an append line in lilo.conf - check your dmesg for what the physical address is - you should see something like 0x3f8, IRQ 7, DMA 3 - you should add all of these numbers to lilo and reboot. If this doesn't work, I'm out of ideas, except that perhaps software like magicfilter and lpd or CUPS may be able to find your printer even if you can't. I've found the printer to be one of the messiest pieces of a Debian install.
Good luck,
Steve
Reply to: