Where's my printer gone?

[GeoffreyN]

I have had Mandrake 7.0 installed for about six months and everything was working fine including my local Epson 670. I did not use the system for about a month and forgot the root password so did a reinstall a couple of days ago and at the end of the Configure Printer bit, I did a test print but nothing happened to the printer so I finished installing and then tried ls >/dev/lp — nothing. Lpq showed no entries. The /etc/printcap file seems normal but just in case, here it is:

##PRINTTOOL3## LOCAL uniprint NaxNA a4 {} U_EpsonStylusColor stcany
lp:\
:sd=/var/spool/lpd/lp:\
:mx#0:\
:sh:\
:lp=/dev/lp0:\
:if=/var/spool/lpd/lp/filter:

Printtool shows that /dev/lp0 is detected, I’ve checked the connections etc. If I go back into Windows it prints fine. Can anyone please suggest anything else I could try?

[henri]

From the reading of your printcap I guess that you should have tried :
ls > /dev/lp0 instaed of ... /dev/lp

you could try also :
ls > toto
cat toto > /dev/lp0
lpr -Plp toto

[GeoffreyN]

Thanks for the reply. I did try using lp0 without result. I ended up swapping the 640 I had at work and it works perfectly! It must be the individual machine - some fault or other which Windows ignores and Linux does not. I am leaving things the way they are - at least I now know it is not a Linux problem.