parport module, ASUS motherboard

[Jim McCloskey <mcclosk@ucsc.edu>]

I recently installed Debian testing on a newly built machine with an
ASUS P4P800 motherboard.  The kernel is a patched version of 2.4.22
(patched to include support for the on-board LAN controller on the
ASUSP4P800).

Everything works fine except for a problem with local printing.
Lprng is the print-spooler software. Printing to networked printers
works fine, but printing to the HP Printer attached to the parallel
port is impossible.

The error-message produced by numerous sources (e.g. checkpc) is:

     cannot open lp device '/dev/lp0' - No such device or address

I've tracked the problem down, I believe, to a failure to load the
parport_pc kernel-module. The relevant part of /etc/modules.conf looks
like this:

     alias parport_lowlevel parport_pc

which I believe should have the consequence that parport_pc is loaded
when parport is loaded (and the compiled module is in fact in
/lib/modules/2.4.22). But it won't load. lsmod reveals:

   # lsmod 
     Module                  Size  Used by    Not tainted
     lp                      6432   0  (autoclean)
     parport                14880   0  [lp]
     sk98lin               151712   1  (autoclean)

Any attempt to load parport_pc (or the combination of parport, lp, and
parport_pc) by hand fails, and gives the usual:

    Hint: insmod errors can be caused by incorrect module parameters,
    including invalid IO or IRQ parameters. 

The User Guide for the motherboard says that the parallel port is on
IRQ 7, but trying:

    insmod parport_pc irq=7

Has anyone dealt with a similar problem? If anyone has advice or help
to offer, I'd be most grateful. Thanks for reading this far,

Jim McCloskey