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
