/dev/lpt0: Device busy, lptcontrol: ioctl: Operation not supported

[Anton Shterenlikht]

Hello

My printing stopped working quite suddenly.

Until today I used FBSD-6.3-prerelease (today I updated to 6.3-stable)
on compaq armada 1700 laptop to print on a parallel HP laserjet 2100
printer in text mode and for postscript via apsfilter. All was fine.

Then I got another parallel printer, epson lq-550 24-pin dot matrix,
and played with printing on both printers by just unplugging one
and plugging the other to the laptop's parallel port. For a while
all was fine.

However, after several days, I cannot now print on either printer.
With laserjet I get

# lptest 20 20 > /dev/lpt0
/dev/lpt0: Device busy.

With matrix printer I get
# lptest 20 20 > /dev/lpt0
#

but nothing is printed.

If I use the spooling system with laserjet I get

# lpq
waiting for lp to become ready (offline?)
Rank   Owner      Job  Files                                 Total Size
1st    root       9    (standard input)                      317 bytes

# cat /var/spool/lpd/good/log
PAGE: 1 1
INFO: Printing page 1...
#

# cat /var/spool/lpd/good/status
waiting for lp to become ready (offline?)
#

and the printer never becomes online.

With matrix printer I get

# lpq
lp is ready and printing
Rank   Owner      Job  Files                                 Total Size
active root       8    (standard input)                      317 bytes
# lpq
no entries

but again nothing is printed.

I tried to play with lptcontrol, but I get the following:

# lptcontrol -i -d /dev/lpt0.ctl
lptcontrol: ioctl: Operation not supported
# lptcontrol -s -d /dev/lpt0.ctl
lptcontrol: ioctl: Operation not supported

I updated the OS and rebuilt the kernel:

FreeBSD 6.3-STABLE Wed Jan 23 10:46:54 GMT 2008

but that didn't help.

In my device.hints I have the following printer related lines:
hint.ppc.0.at="isa"
#hint.ppc.0.irq="7"

to enable the polling mode.

My parallel port settings:

# grep ppc /var/run/dmesg.boot
ppc0: <Parallel port> at port 0x378-0x37f on isa0
ppc0: Generic chipset (EPP/NIBBLE) in COMPATIBLE mode
ppbus0: <Parallel port bus> on ppc0
#

There is nothing in the /var/log/lpd-errs.

I did find some similar posts in various archives, but couldn't
see any suggestions.

My questions:

1.	Could I have fried my parallel chip by changing the printers with
	laptop powered on? How can I check this?

2.	What does "Device busy" really mean, and why I cannot change
	the setting with lptcontrol?

3.	Any other tests I could do to pinpoint the source of the problem?

many thanks
anton 

-- 
Anton Shterenlikht
Room 2.6, Queen's Building
Mech Eng Dept
Bristol University
University Walk, Bristol BS8 1TR, UK
Tel: +44 (0)117 928 8233 
Fax: +44 (0)117 929 4423