I hooked up an old HP LaserJet 4L printer to my parallel port, and I haven't been able to get it to work. The printer installation in KDE Control Module seemed to go smoothly, and the job appears in the queue, and says Processing, then Error. Then a red X appears on the printer icon, and it says the printer is stopped. If I restart it, the same thing happens.

This is an old Celeron 533 system. I dual boot it with Windows 98, and it prints fine there, so I know the hardware is OK. I can print from this Debian installation to a shared printer (including this 4L) on a Windows XP box in another room through ethernet, so I don't think it's a problem with the Debian installation.

The only thing I can think of is that Debian didn't detect the parallel port correctly. It was set for SPP in the BIOS; I tried changing it to ECP + EPP and nothing changed.

Is there somewhere I can look to see if the parallel port is set up properly in Linux? Any other ideas?

I vaguely remember that I had to switch off plug and play for the parallel port in the BIOS to get an Epson printer working. Maybe you could try with another printer model?

Thanks, good idea, and while I was in there I double checked for any other problems... it's using IRQ7 and address 378, and there are no conflicts, and still nothing.

I don't have another parallel printer to try. If I did and that worked, I'd be even more confused, since I can print to this printer from Linux when it's connected to a Windows machine in the other room.