I used to use Opensuse 10.0 until yesterday. With 10.0, my ancient HPLaserjet 4 (Serialport) worked fine. Now that I have upgraded to 10.1., Yast does not find it any more. I have tried everything I could think of under Yast and KPrintmanager, but to no avail.
It is probably something really stupid I am overlooking, but does anyone have an idea?

Many thanks!!

A much newer version of HPLIP is included in 10.1 than in 10.0. May not be your problem but its a place to look. There's lots of information on HPLIP on the hp.com web site.

Many thanks.

I've had a look around the site, and nothing seemed to fit the bill.
Furthermore, the problem seems to occur at an earlier stage. When I test the printer connection in YAST (where it should print 'Hello World'), I get the error message
Now, I have checked all this, and all seems right (as to the cabling problem, I didn't touch the cables since the printer worked fine under Suse 10.0, and I checked all connections etc). So am I right in assuming that the problem sits before the driver?

Many thanks again.

Just guessing but, I'd check permissions on the serials port in /dev.

Thanks. I checked, and /dev/lp0 has the right permissions. I also tried
echo -en "\rHello\r\f" >/dev/lp0
in a terminal (I found this in the old 9.0 handbook), and nothing happened for a while. When I interrupted (control c), I got:
bash: echo: write error: Interrupted system call
I am not certain if this is relevant.

You said serial printer so I thought it might be on one of the tty devices. Your problem isn't permissions because you were allowed to send to the port. Permissions issues fail instantly. Sounds like it already worked on this hardware. SuSE 10.0 shipped with HPLIP 0.9.4 and 10.1 with HPLIP 0.9.7. You might check on hp.com to see if your printer is still supported in 0.9.7.

You are right, it seems to have something to do with the driver, because
- when I connected another printer (HP DJ940c), it was recognised, both via the parallel port and the USB port (although I only configured it on the USB port). Intersting: When the DJ940c was connected to the USB port and the LJ4 to the parallel port, nothing worked, no USB device (Mouse, DJ940c), and the LJ4 not either (which was to be expected), and when I disconnected the LJ4, everything was fine.
- when I checked on the HPLIP website, I found that the LJ4 (without any letters) is not listed, neither under supported nor under not supported. LJ4P, LJ4PS and others are there as supported, but not mine.

Consequently, I tried to find an older version of HPLIP, but couldn't find it anywhere. I could certainly go back to SuSE 10.0, but 10.1 works better in every other respect, and so I would like to keep it, or buy a new printer (because I need a laser printer), but I resent the thought of buying a new printer when the old one works perfectly well (for over 10 years now!). So ideally, there should be an older version of HPLIP somewhere out there (do you know where?), or another driver that might do the trick.

Many thanks again for your help.

I'd try HP support. You may not be the first to ask this question and they may have access to the older version. I tried http://www.google.com/linux?hl=en&lr...se&btnG=Search and got 282 hits. Perhaps you can find an RPM in there. The search argument could be more specific but I don't know which architecture you have. BY the way, both SuSE 9.3 and 10.0 used that HPLIP.

Well, I have tried a number of things now.
First, I installed HPLIP 0.9.4, but the same problem persisted. No communication between the computer and the printer. I'd assumed that even without proper driver, an ASCII string would still be printed.

Anyway, I checked the HP and the HPLIP website very carefully, and I seem to be the only person with this problem.

Then I connected the other printer (the colour deskjet), which so far was connected via USB, via the parallel port (because it has a parallel port socket), and, lo and behold, it was recognised by YAST (it gave the proper address name and address of the printer), but then, when I tried to configure the printer (which is a step further than I went before my mail of 06.06.06), the signal did not get through. Same error again.
Hmm. So I tried another printer cable (one never knows), but same problem again. I checked permissions for /dev/lp0, and they are fine.

So my working hyposthesis is that there is something wrong with the parallel port. As everything worked well before I installed SUSE 10.1, I assume that there is a software problem somewhere. Where?
Or is there something like an adapter from parallel port cable to USB? This would not solve the problem, but at least circumvene it.

If fragos, who's been very helpful so far, or someone else has an idea, please let me know.

USB to parallel adapters do exist. This is one example in the $20 range. I can't warrant that Linux supports this but I would think it does. These guys in general have very good prices. http://www.pcclub.com/product_detail...temno=A5322114

Problem solved.
When I was looking for the adaptor (living in Australia, I thought I might buy it locally ), I found a Printer Server device with parallel ports (so it went quite cheaply, as this is a little dated). Using this, I connected the printer to my home network, and this works perfectly. Probably because it avoids the parallel port of the desktop. So, strictly speaking, the problem is not solved, but at least successfully avoided.

Many thanks again for your help, fragos. That's very much appreciated.
soenderup

One of the great things about Linux is there are many ways to do almost anything. Parallel ports are becoming passe anyway. Some boxes no longer have PS/2 ports -- they depend on USB. Even some printers don't have parallel port interfaces anymore. Glad it all worked out for you. -- George