Long story short: I have a computer without a parallel port, and a printer that requires one. My computer has USB, so I bought a USB->Parallel converter (a Belkin F5U002 Revision 2 wire). After many many hours of googling around and looking at everything I could find, I am still having trouble.
I can do "cat /proc/cpuinfo > /dev/usblp0", and it will hang forever ---
or until I take the printer off-line and then put the printer back
on-line; additionally, it loses the first byte of the print job no
matter how it is submitted (including redirected directly to the printer
using the "cat" command above). This is a standard, ASCII handling,
dot-matrix printer that is Epson compatible.
It worked perfectly with my previous computer, which had a parallel
port, so I know that this isn't an issue with the printer itself.
I have tried using the usblp driver (which the kernel tries to use by
default), which was a no go. I then attempted to modify the usblp
driver by adding the following to the quirk_printers[] structure array,
to force the kernel to use unidirectional mode:
{ 0x050d, 0x0002, USBLP_QUIRK_BIDIR }, /* Belkin F5U002 */
The only result that had was to show this up repeatedly in the kernel's
ring buffer output by dmesg:
drivers/usb/class/usblp.c: usblp0: error -115 writing to printer
... about once every 10 seconds.
So, my travels then led me to try using the uss720 driver to talk to the
printer. However, this failed horribly; it wouldn't even talk. Even
worse, I had to restart my system to get the thing back out of memory,
because once it was there, it wouldn't leave. It left behind lots of
errors, too (I am only showing one of each; but there were 6,435 lines
of this stuff, cut down to 5 lines by sort and uniq):
drivers/usb/misc/uss720.c: async_complete: urb error -104
drivers/usb/misc/uss720.c: async_complete: urb error -32
drivers/usb/misc/uss720.c: async_complete: urb error -62
drivers/usb/misc/uss720.c: get_1284_register timeout
drivers/usb/misc/uss720.c: get_1284_register: usb error -32
I am lost as to how to make this work. The only thing that I can guess
is that the IEEE1284 controller inside of this thing is expecting some
different treatment than what it is getting from usblp or uss720. What
it expects, I don't know.
So, I have a couple groups of questions:
(1) Has anyone seen this problem, and maybe knows how to work around
it? If not, can I somehow provide the necessary information that
would be necessary to fix this? I would be happy to test
anything with potential to get this going.
(2) I (attempted to) read through usblp.c and friends and compare them
with other systems that claim to drive this piece of hardware.
However, that really got me nowhere. For example, FreeBSD claims
to support this controller/wire, but it doesn't even boot on my
system, so I could not verify this. (The kernel panics, so I
don't even get the chance to try.) If I can try to test this
piece of hardware under a different operating system and it works,
would that maybe provide enough information to get it going
(again, it looks like) under Linux?
I hope that I have provided enough information; if not please feel free
to ask. I have also included the relevant section of the output of
lsusb -vvv below the signature block.
Thanks in advance,
Mike
--
Michael B. Trausch Internet Mail & Jabber: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Phone: (404) 592-5746 x1 http://www.trausch.us/
Mobile: (678) 522-7934 VoIP: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Pidgin 2.1.1 and plugins for Ubuntu Feisty! http://www.trausch.us/pidgin
---- begin snipped output of sudo lsusb -vvv
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 050d:0002 Belkin Components
Device Descriptor:
bLength 18
bDescriptorType 1
bcdUSB 1.00
bDeviceClass 0 (Defined at Interface level)
bDeviceSubClass 0
bDeviceProtocol 0
bMaxPacketSize0 8
idVendor 0x050d Belkin Components
idProduct 0x0002
bcdDevice 2.02
iManufacturer 1 Belk USB Printing Support
iProduct 2 IEEE-1284 Controller
iSerial 0
bNumConfigurations 1
Configuration Descriptor:
bLength 9
bDescriptorType 2
wTotalLength 78
bNumInterfaces 1
bConfigurationValue 1
iConfiguration 0
bmAttributes 0x80
(Bus Powered)
MaxPower 100mA
Interface Descriptor:
bLength 9
bDescriptorType 4
bInterfaceNumber 0
bAlternateSetting 0
bNumEndpoints 1
bInterfaceClass 7 Printer
bInterfaceSubClass 1 Printer
bInterfaceProtocol 1 Unidirectional
iInterface 0
Endpoint Descriptor:
bLength 7
bDescriptorType 5
bEndpointAddress 0x01 EP 1 OUT
bmAttributes 2
Transfer Type Bulk
Synch Type None
Usage Type Data
wMaxPacketSize 0x0040 1x 64 bytes
bInterval 0
Interface Descriptor:
bLength 9
bDescriptorType 4
bInterfaceNumber 0
bAlternateSetting 1
bNumEndpoints 2
bInterfaceClass 7 Printer
bInterfaceSubClass 1 Printer
bInterfaceProtocol 2 Bidirectional
iInterface 0
Endpoint Descriptor:
bLength 7
bDescriptorType 5
bEndpointAddress 0x01 EP 1 OUT
bmAttributes 2
Transfer Type Bulk
Synch Type None
Usage Type Data
wMaxPacketSize 0x0040 1x 64 bytes
bInterval 0
Endpoint Descriptor:
bLength 7
bDescriptorType 5
bEndpointAddress 0x82 EP 2 IN
bmAttributes 2
Transfer Type Bulk
Synch Type None
Usage Type Data
wMaxPacketSize 0x0040 1x 64 bytes
bInterval 0
Interface Descriptor:
bLength 9
bDescriptorType 4
bInterfaceNumber 0
bAlternateSetting 2
bNumEndpoints 3
bInterfaceClass 255 Vendor Specific Class
bInterfaceSubClass 0
bInterfaceProtocol 255
iInterface 0
Endpoint Descriptor:
bLength 7
bDescriptorType 5
bEndpointAddress 0x01 EP 1 OUT
bmAttributes 2
Transfer Type Bulk
Synch Type None
Usage Type Data
wMaxPacketSize 0x0040 1x 64 bytes
bInterval 0
Endpoint Descriptor:
bLength 7
bDescriptorType 5
bEndpointAddress 0x82 EP 2 IN
bmAttributes 2
Transfer Type Bulk
Synch Type None
Usage Type Data
wMaxPacketSize 0x0040 1x 64 bytes
bInterval 0
Endpoint Descriptor:
bLength 7
bDescriptorType 5
bEndpointAddress 0x83 EP 3 IN
bmAttributes 3
Transfer Type Interrupt
Synch Type None
Usage Type Data
wMaxPacketSize 0x0004 1x 4 bytes
bInterval 1
Device Status: 0x0000
(Bus Powered)
---- end snipped output of sudo lsusb -vvv
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
