[lug] Re lpc status and sh

[Rob Mohr]

Hello,

Well, the permission denied error was my fault, I read a deja comp.linux
ng and followed the lead, but the party really meant, I believe on
reflection, lpc status.  Doing that I get back
lp:
     queuing is enable
     printing is enabled
     3 entries in spool area
     waiting for lp to become ready (offline ?)
Blue:#

On another post and thread to the same usenet group someone suggested the
following sh script to check and verify.
# sh
# for a in /dev/lp*
> do
> echo "This is $a^L" >> $a
> done

And the result of the above is

sh: /dev/lp1: Device not configured
sh: /dev/lp2: Device not configured
Blue:#

A little bit of context.  I installed this debian potato this past july
onto a 486.  Have used it for pine.  And it did ascii print from the pine
session ok, no stair case.  And when I first fired up x session and
mozzila browser, I test printed a page.  This first page caused a
configuration window to pop up.  IIRC, that page did go ok.  Also, after
the initial install I believe I did a successful test print of ls >
/dev/lp0.  After that I had to box things up and move.  Now, last week, I
started into LaTeX.  Got to the part foo.txt foo.dvi foo.ps and gv works
fine on the x viewing window.  But trying to print all marked or all just
kicks out seven-ten blank pages.  And lpr -p foo.txt just kicks out one
page with the top header of the date-time stamp, filename, and page 1;
that is it, just a blank page below. Finally, trying enscript foo.txt
gives a staircase and about seven-ten blank pages.  (at first I was
getting a "media A2 not found" error.  I patched the enscript.cfg file to
include a line with A2 and the parameters that matched with "letter"
media.

One more bit of info.  The deb install was almost nominal, but the PC did
crash in the middle, once, twice.  And at that time I had trouble getting
the dialup going.  "Hostname not found."  Per help from this list, I was
missing a two line configuration file.  The minicom & wvdial setups did
not generated this needed file.  

Here, too, I am *guessing* that I am missing a file.  Call it hanging on a
file  Again, per a usenet post I did 
cat /etc/conf.modules And it returned No such file or directory.

cat /proc/parport/0/devices reported the same as above.

cat /proc/parport/0/hardware returns
base:   0x378
irq:    none
dma:    none
modes:  SPP

And from my dmesg log (abridged here)
parport0: PC-style at 0x378 [SPP]
parport_probe: failed
  NO PCI SUPPORT.
parport0: no IEEE-1284 device present.
lp0: using parport0 (polling).
lp0 offline
end of log file right after the preceeding line of lp0 offline

I will go back and re-read the printing HOWTO but I doubt if it will get
me going.  My printer is an HP LaserJet 4L, which I belive is PostScript
compliant.  

One usenet post regarding "lp0 off-line" mentions having to recompile the
kernel. I have read a bit about compiling, but I have not done that
before.  I am under the impression that if something is left outside of
the kernel, a module may be "started up later" via a command line
operation.  From my viewpoint, espcially when lpq has print jobs pending
an "offline printer" I am missing a device module vis-a-vis the kernel?

Rob Mohr
eof