Topic: fix: Parport0 - irq7 error message

[Roy Barkas]

In case anyone else is having this problem or knows of a better solution...

I have a laser printer plugged into LPT1 and it seems to work fine.  Whenever the laser was accessed by a client computer, a message popped up on the e-smith console:
"parport0: detected irq 7; use procfs to enable interrupt-driven operation".  Seems to happen on native RH7 as well as e-smith 4.01.

I found a few obscure references in a web search - the concensus seemed to be that i needed to do:

"echo 7 > /proc/parport/0/irq"

I did this via rc.local and it seems to remedy the problem.

The parallel port driver source discusses another mod that may be necessary for some printers to fix a problem with interrupts that don't work correctly - it's worth a look if printer corruption occurs.  It suggests that the addition of the line:

"tunelp /dev/lp0 -T on"  

will help.

Hope you all don't mind my posting this here but I'm hoping we can save someone new to e-smith or redhat some concern or hours of searching for an obscure fix.

[HIIi]

Perhaps you can help?

e-smith 4.0 on a Compaq 575 has been working fine as a gateway and server, but I have had no success in hooking a laser printer to the parallel port for network printing.
The the e-smith printer set-up seems simple and straight forward.

On my Windows machines, should I see the printer icon off of the e-smith server in the Network Neightbourhood? I don't.

(e-smith doesn't ask for a driver, so I am assuming that a PC with a print request will use it's own driver for that printer and e-smith will be sort of transparent between the PC and the printer).

When I try to add a network printer on one of the PCs, and I browses the network for the path, it can't see a printer attached to the e-smith server (it doesn't work if I install it as offline either).

-My parallel port cable is ok. It works if I make the laser printer a network printer off of one of the networks PCs.

-According to it's manual, the pinouts for the Compaq's parallel port are standard (same as my other PCs)

-The Compaq's BIOS shows the parallel port enabled with no security turned on.

-I tried three other parallel port BIOS IRQs, with no success.

Any help will be much appreciated, especially in regards to the "printer icon" question.

Thanks.

[Roy Barkas]

Glad to help if I can...

perhaps you're juggling too many unknowns as you try to diagnose your problem?

The first thing I'd do if I were having this problem - assuming that you haven't already done so - is to boot the Compaq from a DOS floppy or some old diagnostic floppy and make sure that you can access and use the printer in that simplest of all worlds.  If Compaq do things in a more or less reasonable way you should be able to ascertain the IO port and interrupt associated with the parallel port from the bios setup.  

Once you've verified that the printer and cable and the parallel port all work correctly then you can quickly go on to seeing if you can print directly from e-smith ...  

and then once that works you can look look at what windows and the various network bits and pieces are doing, etc. Ordinarily the lpt1: IO port and IRQ shouldn't be issues unless yours are weirdly non-standard or you have inadvertantly done something while trying to solve the problem that has caused linux to be confused.

I hope this doesn't come across like I'm lecturing at you - it's just that there are so many variable that unless some are eliminated it will be really confusing to try to assist via messages.

Once you're happy that you can access the printer from the PC and that you can print from Linux I can take you step by step through what is required to connect from a Windows machine on my system if that will help (we run both Win2k and WinMe so we go from the ridiculous to the slime .

I'll check back and see how you're going.  Good luck.