Parallel Port Printing Blues

Karl Agee kdagee at hotmail.com
Mon Nov 15 23:02:00 PST 2004


I have a Freebsd 4.10-stable system that I am having problems getting 
parallel port printing to work on.

The printer is an old HP DeskJet 820C Winprinter 
http://linuxprinting.org/show_printer.cgi?recnum=HP-DeskJet_820C that works 
well on the same box in Linux-Mandrake 10.0 Official.

I have cups installed and running, have the ppd file from linuxprinting.org 
and can get onto the cups admin interface ok.  I have configured the printer 
using both cups and apsfilter.

and have gone through the printing section of the handbook, and Dru's recent 
article on unix printing on Onlamp.com. I've also searched and searched 
google and this mailing list, havent found anything yet.  Also read Mike 
Lucas' article on apsfilter.

The kernel detects the port and the printer fine.  dmesg shows:

ppc0: <Parallel port> at port 0x378-0x37f irq 7 on isa0
ppc0: SMC-like chipset (ECP/EPP/PS2/NIBBLE) in COMPATIBLE mode
ppc0: FIFO with 16/16/15 bytes threshold
ppbus0: IEEE1284 device found /NIBBLE/ECP
Probing for PnP devices on ppbus0:
ppbus0: <HEWLETT-PACKARD DESKJET 820C> SCP,VLINK

I've set the perms on the lpt0 to:

crw-r-xr-x  1 root  wheel   16,   0 Nov 15 21:27 /dev/lpt0


When printing a cups test page, nothing happens, meaning, no printing 
occurs.  Cups shows the job "aborted".  the cups logs show nothing.

When printing an apsfilter test page, the system crashes, meaning, it 
freezes solid.  I have to do a hard reboot.

when I try running # lptest > dev/lpt0, nothing happens from the printer.  I 
get no error messages.

I've run out of ideas, other than replacing this (perfectly useable) boat 
anchor.

--karl

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