I've got a Canon BJC-4300ex printer that works well using Knoppix 3.6 & CUPS, but with Slackware-current, 2.6.11.5 kernel, CUPS comes up with Device URI: parallel:/dev/unknown-parallel0 , and when I try to print, there are no errors, but nothing happens.

/dev has an entry for /dev/lp0.

Using KDE's Control Center printer setup utility, I can manually edit the URI to parallel:/dev/lp0. KDE complains that 'The local URI doesn't correspond to a detected port.', but it will get the printer to print, but extremely slowly... a single word "test" takes ~2 minutes...

I've got a hunch that this is a udev issue regarding the parallel port, but I'm not up to speed on how to fix this... or maybe I'm way off base???

I've uninstalled/reinstalled CUPS, checked for missing modules, etc., googled for hours, and can't seem to resolve this. Any help is really appreciated,
netcrawl.

In case this makes any sense to anyobody, it prints normally if I issue 'cat /some/text/file >> /dev/lp0', so I'm thinking it's CUPS related???

Anyone?

did you try setting up the printer using a web browser to the cups interface
try clicking on this
http://127.0.0.1:631

Sorry if I wasn't clear in the first post, I initially configured CUPS with a web browser at localhost:631, that's where the parallel port is identitfied as /dev/unknown-parallel0, which does not print at all.

that's weird -- don't mean to waste your time but i have never seen that before
what do you get when you do
dmesg | grep parport

I re-compiled the kernel with all the parallel port stuff compiled in the kernel instead of as modules, re-booted, fired up CUPS, configured the printer, and got /dev/lp0. So it would print, but it was still very slow using the recommended Gimp-print driver. So I installed Foomatic with foomatic+bjc600 driver
and it prints just fine. Man I wasted a lot of time on this.

Not sure why modules wouldn't work, but all's well, for now,

Thanks for your interest, anyway,
netcrawl