Fedora Core 3 and up to date; at least a year since installation and printer worked all this time.

I rebooted recently and was not prepaared for notice that it didn't find the printer it was looking for.

Cups is installed. I use the System Servies -> Print GUI to try and recover the printer. But this tool isn't addressing the problem.

The problem is and it's my guess, is that the parallel port is nolonger part of the boot process.

One I need to know how to check this out. I need to confirm that there is a parallel port. How do I do this.

If you have suggestions what I can run from a command line to isolocate what the problem might be please comment

For a parallel printer, I'd expect modules parport, lp and maybe parport_pc to be loaded. Are they in the output of command 'lsmod'?

If not you could try 'modprobe lp' and see what happens. Also check for error messages from the kernel in the output of 'dmesg' relating to these.

If everything seems OK you can also check the log files in /var/log/cups. On the KDE print config screen you can also set cups for maximum debug info. Not sure how you do this if not using KDE.

all very helpful
the problem has been resolved
thanks