Hi all,
I am setting up a gentoo box for a friend of mine, and I'm having problems communicating with the printer.
The printer is a parallel port HP deskjet 712C.
After enabling the parallel port in the bios, I was able to detect the device from ptal-init as a deskjet-710C, but failed to communicate with it.
The parallel port is enabled at address 378, as device /dev/lp0.
It asks me to check the syslog file for ptal-mlcd error messages. I tried dmesg, and the only error reported there is "Spurious 8259A interrupt, IRQ7".
I have the kernel (2.4 kernel) configured with the following options in the parallel port support submenu (compiled in, not as modules).
Parallel Port Support
PC Style Hardware
Multi-IO cards (parallel and serial)
Use FIFO / DMA if available (EXPERIMENTAL)
SuperIO chipset support (EXPERIMENTAL)
IEEE 1284 transfer modes
The following option is de-selected
Support foreign hardware
The parallel printer support option (parport) under the character devices submenu is compiled as a module, and is loaded at startup (parport is in the /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.4 file).
I've tried configuring the bios for both EPP/ECP and EPP parallel ports with the same result, though I haven't yet tried reconfiguring the IRQ or addesses in the bios to different locations.
Is there anywhere else I can look for ptal-mlcd error messages to get further debug help?
I also tried configuring it directly instead of using ptal via cups. Cups reports that it connects to the printer, but sending a test page to the printer does not cause any output, even though cups thinks it has successfully printed the test page.
Any assistance/advice gratefully received.
Thanks
Jeff
