I'm experiencing a problem with a HP T-45 printer I've connected to the parallel port on one of my Linux computers. Here's hoping someone has a suggestion.

As for history on this, I had a different parallel port printer hooked to this box with SUSE 9.3, which worked. I have since reformatted and installed SUSE 10.0. During the install, I did not have a printer connected to the box.

I removed the T-45 from another identical box, where it was working fine (same printer and cable) and connected it to the second box, to which I wanted it installed.

I was surprised when I rebooted the box that the printer was not detected by SUSE 10.0, but went into YAST to attempt an install of the T-45.

I installed the T-45 through YAST. If I look under "Printers" in SUSE, I can see the T-45. If I open OpenOffice or any other program to print, I see the T-45 printer shown, but I cannot print.

I see the print job queued from the T-45 but it never prints. I have to eventually delete the print job.

I checked in BIOS and the parallel port is set to ECC, as it should be. Same as on the other system, where the T-45 worked with the same motherboard.

As I say, everything appears to work, but there is no print. It seems like the parallel port and the printer are not communicating.

Anyone have any ideas what I can do? (I don't need this one to scan or anything....although it is multi-function. Just need it to print.)

Regards,
zenarcher

Well, I managed to get this one fixed. It turns out, the problem was related to the numerous and conflicting HP drivers, associated with many of these HP printers. Again, I completely removed the printer from the system, including removal by running /usr/sbin/ptal-inst setup. I reinstalled, using the old style HP driver, then once again ran ptal-inst setup. I removed the comment in front of hpoj in /etc/sane.d/dll.conf.

I can now print and scan with the HP OfficeJet T-45. Just as with the HP PSC 1401, I must run /usr/sbin/ptal-inst start before I can scan. Then, I must run /usr/sbin/ptal-inst stop before I can print again. Of course, those must be run as "su" from a terminal.

Regards,
zenarcher