Poor documentation was included with the product. The driver disk is similarly crappy, just a bunch of directories (like 9) with *.exe files with no descriptions.

Anyway, the trick was to plug the empty usb cable into the computer (I did it on a Windows XP machine) before plugging the parallel end into the printer. XP must have pushed something onto the chip so that it knew it was a printing cable. Then I plugged in the printer and it worked fine. I then unplugged the usb cable from the XP box and plugged it into my Debian Etch box and CUPS found the printer as a USB printer.

I'm not sure if you could do it without the XP box. I blundered across a thread on net that said to plug the empty cable in. I was still on the XP box fiddling around, so I just did it there.

Otherwise, it works perfectly and was really inexpensive.

Nothing shows up in lspci. lsusb -v shows a usb printer, but not the cable.