Well, my printer works fine under Windoze. No problems whatsoever.
However, Linux 2.0.25 refuses to detect the presence of the parallel port
(evidence follows). I looked at the patches for .26 and .27, and I do not
see anything relating to drivers/char/lp.c, and, since I've got a pretty
stable system going (except for this problem), I prefer not to patch
unless it is absolutely necessary.
The driver produces the following message, when initialized:
lp: Driver configured but not interfaces found.
This happens whether I compile lp as a module, or have it in the kernel.
Writing to any /dev/lp* results in ENXIO.
Looking at the source code, I see that this message is generated when lp
can't autodetect the parallel port at any known I/O address. After
running my BIOS config, and booting into Windoze, I see that my parallel
port, by default, is an EPP, I/O address 0x378.
When I add some debugging messages to see what's going on, the following
picture emerges: lp.c writes a 00 byte into the I/O port address, then
reads the I/O port address, expecting a 00 byte, but it gets a FF byte on
my machine.
I patch lp.c and fool it into thinking that it gets back a 00 byte when it
pokes 0x378. lp comes up and initializes fine, but, basically, /dev/lp*
is now just a fancy alias for /dev/null. Whatever I write to that device
goes into a bit bucket, and the printer stays silent. "tunelp" from the
Slackware 96 distribution tells me that the printer is out of paper. It
is not. There's plenty of paper in the printer :-)
Seems as though your parallel port device is really not there when you
boot Linux. I suspect you have a true Plug and Play BIOS that is not
configuring the device and expecting the OS to do it. You didn't say
it, but I would guess you are running Windows 95.
Try looking for something in your BIOS setup screens that say
something like 'Plug and Play OS' and turn it off. When this is
turned on, the BIOS only configures devices necessary to boot (namely
disk drives and video) and leaves the rest up to the OS. Since Linux
is not (yet) plug-and-play, you need to tell the BIOS to configure
everything.
-Matt
P.S. I just installed Debian 1.2 on my work machine, and I was really
impressed that the X configuration almost worked out of the box! Not
only did it figure out what video card I have, it also figured out
exactly what _monitor_ I had! It didn't get the mouse correct, which
is the only thing that needed changing.
-- Matthew E. Cross E-Mail: mcross@sw.stratus.com Software Engineer Phone: 508-460-2926 Stratus Computer, Inc. Fax: 508-460-0397