so after a week poking around ....

my epson c62 decided not to turn on so decided to make a canon IP6220D printer the default for my lan. (all three of my linux computers printed fine with the epson)

the canon is connected to a fairly new mac -took me a while in unfamiliar territory to "adjust" the mac to static IP so I could find it.

used kcontrol to set up the connection (using raw so the apple would use it's own driver.

also changed the LPDEST variable in /etc/profile.

one machine running slackware 12.0 prints fine. but the machine I use mostly has been upgraded (not a clean install) to 12.1.

the 12.0 machine prints fine but the 12.1 doesn't seem to want to print out the output from a dbaseIII program I use with dosemu (1.4).

lpr works with a text file and lpq and lprm do also (with the 12.1).

I think both the configurations I did are identical. the 12.1 claims to print (lpq shows me printing and the claims the printing is done but nothing happens with the printer.

The Mac should be running 'CUPS'; if you already have CUPS installed on the Linux machines, they have their own discovery routines (assuming the Mac one is configured to share).

Mac is running cups and the 12.0 machine prints fine on the mac's printer
it is just the upgraded 12.1 that prints openoffice, lpr but not dbaseIII with dosemu. (the 12.0 machine does all the above.)

added the line
$_lpt1 = "lpr -P canon"
to /etc/dosemu/dosemu.conf and it works now
the -l switch I had been using seemed to confuse cups.