parallel port not working
 

i have a printer that uses the parallel port and for some reason, when i went to use it, it failed to work. the last time i used it was a couple months ago. i have used this particular printer on this box since Mepis 3. it is a Epson Actionprinter. i am currently running Mepis 8 fully updated (including the community repos)

after checking the print manager, i found that it was not passing the print jobs in the cue to the printer, even though the printer is showing that it is idle & waiting for jobs. i even tried to print a test page by right clicking & choosing "print test page" & it would not even do that. i decided to remove that printer with the "remove printer/class" choice in the menu & run the "add new printer" wizard to re-install it. i found that the "Parallel port" option was empty, but i decided to highlight it anyway & i clicked the "next" button. a
little pop-up box appeared that said "empty link"

after rebooting, i tried doing the same thing as above again. no dice.
i went and grabbed a known good printer & connected it to the computer, booted up, run the "add printer" wizard again, still could not find a parallel port.

i even tried to set it up using the http://localhost:631/admin interface,
but it did not list the parallel port in the drop down menu.
the funny thing is that, the parallel port shows up in Kinfocenter, also during modprobe at bootup time, the printer does activate, so i know that the parallel
port is working. i just wonder why CUPS does not see it, or is this a newly
introduced "bug" from the Debian "point" upgrade or the latest CUPS version is broken.

CUPS was updated 06/04/2009

Upgraded the following packages:
cups (1.3.8-1lenny5) to 1.3.8-1+lenny6
cups-bsd (1.3.8-1lenny5) to 1.3.8-1+lenny6
cups-client (1.3.8-1lenny5) to 1.3.8-1+lenny6
cups-common (1.3.8-1lenny5) to 1.3.8-1+lenny6
cupsys (1.3.8-1lenny5) to 1.3.8-1+lenny6

synaptic does not list any previous versions to fall back on.

can someone point me in the right direction to fix this problem.

Silly question (maybe): is the parallel port enabled in the BIOS?

Warning/Disclaimer: I haven't yet installed MEPIS 8 on any of my own machines.

Sillier Q: Is the printer turned on in the Control Center? -- I had my smb: attached Laser printer mysteriously quit recently, & was going crazy until noticed that it had been stopped & only needed to be restarted.

after doing a search on this particular problem, i found out what the problem was. about a month ago, there were updates to the CUPS system. for some strange reason, CUPS lost permissions to /dev/lp0. i had to change permissions to /dev/lp0 by chmod 775 to get it working again. that is what fixed the problem.