Well, I thought I had everything setup on my wife's PC (thanks to the great folks of this forum), BUT I am having major issues with getting my wife's printer configured properly. I am trying to connect an HP Deskjet 712C (parallel port) printer. I edited my rc.modules to allow for parallel port printing and that seems to show up properly in "dmesg." One major thing I noticed is that I can't prove that CUPS is loading. I "thought" it was supposed to load on startup, therefore it should show up in "dmesg" (which is does NOT). The rc.cups modules has full read, write and exec status. So, it should be loading on startup...BUT I don't think it is. Can someone help me get cups loading properly? Thank you soooooo much!!!

In an effort to help myself, I tried searching the linuxquestions.org forum archive for info on how to install an HP Deskjet 712C,720C,722C printer. I followed all of the instructions about downloaded and compiling the pnm2ppa driver. Did it! Then I copied the proper foomatic files to the appropriate folder. I then went to a linux printing site in order to get the proper ppd file for the 712C. I followed ALL of the instructions, but I still couldn't get it to work. After doing all of this work AND restarting the computer AND running "cupsd &" manually AND logging into "local:631" in order to add a printer....it still won't work. When I print a test page it says it can't make a connection. Interesting enough the device appears to be listed as something like "/dev/unknown-'something'" Now shouldn't the device be /dev/lp0 for the local parallel port?

Any help would be much appreciated!!!

BTW, my wife and I are still enjoying Slack 10!!! Thanks to everyone who has helped this newbie to become educated.

Hmmm.... Well, to manually start cups,

sh /etc/rc.d/rc.cups start

and to kill it

sh /etc/rc.d/rc.cups stop

I made launchers with those commands and threw them in a Gnome "drawer" cause I hate any service running at boot. Makes it easy to start/stop on the fly whenever you need to print.

You can type 'pkgtool' at a terminal and then select 'setup' and then 'services' to make cups fire up at boot. If you see cupsd running as a process with 'ps -aux', it should be fired up. Other than that, I know nothing. I have a psc 2110 running USB that I set up thru the cups web interface and it works like a charm every time.... You have an HP printer tho, so I don't know about all that in your second paragraph. One would think that it would be supported thru your hpijs package and cups alone. The hpijs package that comes with slackware supports a BOATLOAD of HP printers. Thats the main reason why I bought Hewlett Packard and not any thing else.... Some report that cups and lprng do not like each other and you need to uninstall one of them. Actually from what I've heard, you need to uninstall BOTH of them and then re-install your package of choice. I personally have NEVER had a problem with that.

We'll see what the others have to say....

Here's the weird thing, when I used "pkgtool" to check my services, cups is NOT one of the available services. I could not enable it or disable it. (Perhaps on I was not at the proper menu...although I saw other services on the list) That is particularly weird because I did a "full" install. As for the hpijs driver, my printer is not part of that list. I think it is because it is considered a "winprinter." I'm supposed to use a special pnm2ppa driver in order to get it to work. I'm still at a loss!

This forum helped me get me up and going:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...Slack+9.1Howto

However, be sure to do a killall procedure (in the CUPS quick start guide) after installing the ppd file before you do the localhost in the web brower.

Good luck.

According to the link, I need to dump CUPS and reinstall it from scratch. I don't mind having to do that, however WHY would I have to do that. Slackware is such a polished distro. I couldn't imagine a Linux staple like CUPS not working from the start. Instead of installing CUPS from source, as the link suggests, could I just download a Slack Pack for CUPS and do it that way?

I assume you have the cups pkg installed. Check and make sure that it is executable. It is not executable by default if memory serves correct. Easiest way to enable it is with midnight commander (mc as root from command line). Browse to /etc/rc.d and type ctrl-x, then c. Press the space bar and check all the executable boxes and exit.. If you reboot, it cups should start automatically near the end of the boot process.

And the correct URL to browse CUPS admin pages is :
http://localhost:631 and not :
http://local:631

From here, login with your root password, add a printer class name it like you want, add a printer and choose your printer driver

CUPS must be installed on the system because I can run it manually and I can access the admin pages with my web browser. For some reason it appears as if CUPS does NOT load on startup. "dmesg" does not show cups loading. I checked the permissions of the rc.cups file and it is executable, so I don't know what is going on.

Maybe cups is not logged in /var/log/messages ... did you visit the /var/log/cups directory ?

And to view if it is running : ps -auxww | grep -i cups

I tried all of the instructions above, even uninstalled everything and reinstalled it all from source. Still, no luck! I keep getting the following error EVERY time I try a test page or other print job I get the following error

"Printer not connected; will retry in 30 seconds..."
Device URI: parallel:/dev/unknown-parallel0

What is going on?

Thanks for your help!!

Okay, I have a real major question. I have been a windiws user for forever and I thinking I could migrate to linux, becasue I had heard that linux was better than windows and does not cost as much and all that stuff. First, a couple of months ago I acquired mandrake 9.0, nad I tried to install it on my laptop. I already had XP on the system, so I wanted to have a dual OS system kind of. Getting the partitioning done and eventual installation done was a herculian task, I practically spent four to five hours a day for aout a week before I got that stuff to work, and When I eventually got it ot work , 99.99% of my hardware was not recognised. Mandreake did not recognize my external floppy drive , external zip drive, PCMCIA, digital camcorder, printer and scanner.
I really baffled about the whole thing and after trying to figure out the problem for several weeks , i gave up on mandrake. After I devoted another weeks to ensure that I wiped mandrake of my system. It was such a big relief. I was wondering why an OS which people say is a lot better than windows , be a pain in the neck to install and use. Anyways, after that experience I swore never to use any linux distro ever, but months have passed and my interest for linux has been rekindled.
I'm moving into programming and 'they' say that programming is a lot better in linux, so I was wondering if there was a particular linux distibution that someone could recommend to me <a newbie >, that I could easily get used to,k but then , it still have high end computing power..
I was looking at red hat , suse , knoppix, slack, gentoo, etc.there are just so many , so I kind of need some help here.

I am also hopoing that my experience with linus this time around wouldn't be as bsd as it was the first time around. I hope to stick to linux this time aroung assuming th8ing s worked out fine.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Slack 10 default setup doesn't recognize the parallel printer port. Edit /etc/rc.d/rc.modules by uncommenting (removing the # signs) to pertinent lines in the parallel printing support section. If the parallel port is recognized, you're almost home. If it is, you'll see it in localhost set up.

Ugh!! I made sure those lines were uncommented way before I started this process. I did double check the file last night and I found that I had the "else" line was still commented. Unfortunately, after I fixed it, it still wouldn't work.

Still wouldn't work how? If the module was commented in such a way that it wouldn't load at boot, did you attempt to load it after fixing the file? Or did you just try to use the printer, still without the printer port module loaded? Did you also uncomment the #### Parallel printer support ### section that immediately follows the #### PC parallel port support ### section in /etc/rc.d/rc.modules?

Could you post the contents of lsmod and /etc/rc.d/rc.modules? What does /etc/modprobe.conf say? Have you looked at /etc/rc.d/rc.M to see if the Printing System Startup scriptlet is there and seems correct (no oddly-placed "#"s)?

Just some ideas, hope this helps.

Hey, check out www.slashdot.org now; it has an article that could be very useful for slack users for setting upsight and sound.