tlug: The simplest possible printer puzzle

[Dennis McMurchy <denismcm@example.com>]

  Hi all,

  Just back to TLUG after a break of several months.  I will carry
on boring you all with the never-ending problems and dissatisfactions
of someone who upgraded (last June) to RedHat 6.0 from an ancient
(but well-loved) Slackware installation.

  Here's the latest RH6 glitch I'm banging my head against:

  Can't dump ordinary basic ASCII files to /dev/lp1 with a command
like 'cat filename > /dev/lp1' (if there's a more basic way of printing
I don't know what it is).

  No, it's not the permissions, as you can see:

[denismcm@example.com denis]$ ls -l /dev/lp*
crw-rw-rw-   1 root     daemon     6,   0 May  6  1998 /dev/lp0
crw-rw-rw-   1 root     daemon     6,   1 May  6  1998 /dev/lp1
crw-rw-rw-   1 root     daemon     6,   2 May  6  1998 /dev/lp2

  I just get this error message (with any of lp0,1 or 2):

[denismcm@example.com denis]$ wc dan.tmp > /dev/lp1
bash: /dev/lp1: No such device

  Now, I have actually been bold enough to use the printer tool on 
root's administration menu (it fails to detect any printers) without
any success.

  The really interesting thing is that I do still have my old beloved
Slackware installation and when I boot that up, cat'ing an ASCII file
to /dev/lp1 works just like you would expect it to work on any Unix
installation in the world.  So this is hardly a hardware problem. I
will bite my tongue at this point and say nothing about the 'wonders'
of RH6, but I really am stumped and more than a little disappointed
(yet again). It doesn't get much more basic, does it?  What could I be
missing (other than a standard, reliable and usable distribution)?   

  Thanks in advance for any light shed.  Cheers,  Dennis

Dennis McMurchy, 
Sointula, B.C. / Tojinmachi, Fukuoka
Canada           Japan


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