Hi, I've got Hewlett Packard 710c on Slackware 10.0. I've wanted to install this printer, but I saw in /dev/ that lp0 (normally printer) doesn't exists. On other distros like SuSE, Aurox, system has found printer and make auto config, on Slack this printer doesn't work, Slack doesn't see it in /dev/. Why and how to make it work????

"I saw in /dev/ that lp0 (normally printer) doesn't exists."

You can create /dev/lp0 wiht the mknod command:

mknod /dev/lp0 b 6 0

Give /dev/lp0 permissions of 660. On SuSE the ownership is root lp but the group name used will be distribution dependent.

-----------------------
Steve Stites

And will my printer work? Now it doesn't... On other distros (diiffrent than slack) it works correctly - this distros "see" this printer... My printer is Hewlett Packard 710c.
Thx

It should work fine (according to www.linuxprinting.org) it should work perfectly The most important thing you have to do with it is ti configure it. Then system will "see" it definitely. Try configuring it by CUPS, quite easy and simple tool for configuring printers.

is it plugged in parellel port or USB port? If it's usb, you will find it in /dev/usb/lp0.

Have you tried switching the printer on afresh, waiting 5 seconds, and surfing to
http://localhost:631 and adding it in there?
If the usb is set up right, the device should be found. No probs here on slack with 2 different printers. Not _that_ problem anyhow :-).

I had a similar problem and it turned out I didn't compile support for the right modules when I compiled the kernel. Try the following:

lsmod | grep par

Here's what I get on my system:

If you don't see ppdev, lp and parport_pc listed like that then try adding the missing one(s) as follows:

modprobe lp
modprobe ppdev
modprobe parport_pc

and then see if you have /dev/lp0 listed. If not, and especially if it complains that it couldn't find the module then you might have to recompile your kernel with the right options (which sounds scary but is not necessarily that difficult).

1 members found this post helpful.

business_kid & mrspaghetti,
This thread is four YEARS old.
Please don't resurrect dead threads.

How on earth do people manage to find those old threads

They must hold seances.

Actually, this old thread addresses a problem I'm having right now. I have to add a PCI parallel port card to a mail server because of a legacy issue. Unfortunately, I still can't get the card running. Anyone want to take a shot at this?

Using lspci -v I can see the card and its ports (c800, c400, c000, b800, and b400 are all listed as 8-bit ports, b000 is listed as a 16-bit port). It's listed as using irq 19. Doing modprobe parport_pc io=0xb000 irq=0x19 seems to work - at least there's no error back. But it's not clear how to tie this to /dev/lp0. I tried the mknod command, which makes the port, of course, and did chown root.lp /dev/lp0 but neither YaST2 or CUPS can find a printer. The printer is an HP LJ-5P which worked just fine in the old server until it was shutdown yesterday.

IRQ numbers as listed by lspci -v are in decimal AFAIK, so your modprobe command may be telling it to use the wrong IRQ

I am surprised that suse doesn't just see the card at boot, and set everything up for you.

Since I posted the note, I've done some more work on the problem and now have a /dev/lp0. I'm not sure why it decided to appear now, though. The card has been in place for a few days and, of course, there've been a few re-boots including (duh!) the one following the card's installation. And, yes, that should be 0d19 and not 0x19 - the IRQ number is a decimal number not hex.

The problem has now become a little uglier, though. The good news is CUPS can see the printer and add it to CUPS' list of printers (well, all one printer...). The bad news is printing to the printer is a disaster. Even using cat to put "Hello, world!<NL><FF>" into /dev/lp0 gives a badly scrambled "AHello word" with some junk characters tossed in for good measure. Attempting to print a test page with CUPS is even worse as all I see is junk characters instead of the expected test page. In short, the link to /dev/lp0 is in deep trouble.

The printer, BTW, is an HP LaserJet-5P and I'm using the same drivers that worked on the previous openSUSE install (10.3).

Bad cable? Please try a different one.
Is the card properly seated in its slot?

The cable is the same one that's been working for years and it's the only one I have left. However, I did think about re-seating it "just because". Ditto for the card although there I'd say a loose card is more of a GO/NO GO situation than prone to garbled output.

Repeated tries at "Hello world" give the same results, even to the junk characters, every time. That doesn't have the feel of a poor connection, but rather something wrong with the driver or something else in the system. Of course, the big question is just what is doing that.

At this point, I'm about to pitch the printer out the window and put in a networked printer. The LJ-5P is ancient, the drum has a couple of marks on it, and the printer is generally reaching the end of its service life. It's the easy way out and doesn't solve the problem, really, but I do need to move on to other projects. "Plug the printer in, set the driver... how hard can it be?"