There are two completely different device drivers for the parallel
port; which one you are using depends on your kernel version (which
you can find out with the command uname -a). The driver
changed in Linux 2.1.33.
A few details are the same for both styles of driver. Most notably, many people have found that Linux will not detect their parallel port unless they disable "Plug and Play" in their PC BIOS. (This is no surprise; the track record for PnP of non-PCI devices with Windows and elsewhere has been something of a disaster).
The Linux kernel (<=2.1.32), assuming you have compiled in or
loaded the lp device (the output of cat /proc/devices should
include the device lp if it is loaded), provides one or more of
/dev/lp0, /dev/lp1, and /dev/lp2. These
are NOT assigned dynamically, rather, each corresponds to a specific
hardware I/O address. This means that your first printer may be
lp0 or lp1 depending on your hardware. Just try both.
A few users have reported that their bidirectional lp ports aren't detected if they use an older unidirectional printer cable. Check that you've got a decent cable.
One cannot run the plip and lp drivers at the same time on any given port (under 2.0, anyway). You can, however, have one or the other driver loaded at any given time either manually, or by kerneld with version 2.x (and later 1.3.x) kernels. By carefully setting the interrupts and such, you can supposedly run plip on one port and lp on the other. One person did so by editing the drivers; I eagerly await a success report of someone doing so with only a clever command line.
There is a little utility called
tunelp floating about with which you, as root, can tune
the Linux 2.0 lp device's interrupt usage, polling rate, and other
options.
When the lp driver is built into the kernel, the kernel will accept an
lp= option to set interrupts and io addresses:
When the lp driver is built in to the kernel, you may use the
LILO/LOADLIN command line to set the port addresses and interrupts
that the driver will use.
Syntax: lp=port0[,irq0[,port1[,irq1[,port2[,irq2]]]]]
For example: lp=0x378,0 or lp=0x278,5,0x378,7 **
Note that if this feature is used, you must specify *all* the ports
you want considered, there are no defaults. You can disable a
built-in driver with lp=0.
When loaded as a module, it is possible to specify io addresses and
interrupt lines on the insmod command line (or in
/etc/conf.modules so as to affect kerneld) using the usual
module argument syntax. The parameters are io=port0,port1,port2
and irq=irq0,irq1,irq2. Read ye the man page for
insmod for more information on this.
**For those of you who (like me) can never find the standard port numbers when you need them, they are as in the second example above. The other port (lp0) is at 0x3bc. I've no idea what interrupt it usually uses.
The source code for the Linux 2.0 parallel port driver is in /usr/src/linux/drivers/char/lp.c.
Beginning with kernel 2.1.33 (and available as a patch for kernel 2.0.30), the lp device is merely a client of the new parport device. The addition of the parport device corrects a number of the problems that plague the old lp device driver - it can share the port with other drivers, it dynamically assigns available parallel ports to device numbers rather than enforcing a fixed correspondence between I/O addresses and port numbers, and so forth.
The advent of the parport device has enabled a whole flock of new parallel-port drivers for things like Zip drives, Backpack CD-ROMs and disks, and so forth. Some of these are also available in versions for 2.0 kernels; look around on the web.
The main difference that you will notice, so far as printing goes, is that parport-based kernels dynamically assign lp devices to parallel ports. So what was lp1 under Linux 2.0 may well be lp0 under Linux 2.2. Be sure to check this if you upgrade from an lp-driver kernel to a parport-driver kernel.
The most popular problems with this device seems to stem from misconfiguration:
Some Linux distributions don't ship with a properly setup /etc/modules.conf (or /etc/conf.modules), so the driver isn't loaded properly when you need it to be. With a recent modutils, the proper magical lines from modules.conf seem to be:
alias /dev/printers lp # only for devfs? alias /dev/lp* lp # only for devfs? alias parport_lowlevel parport_pc # missing in Red Hat 6.0-6.1
Many PC BIOSes will make the parallel port into a Plug-and-Play device. This just adds needless complexity to a perfectly simple device that is nearly always present; turn off the PnP setting for your parallel prot ("LPT1" in many BIOSes) if your parallel port isn't detected by the Linux driver. The correct setting is often called "legacy", "ISA", or "0x378", but probably not "disabled".
You can also read the file Documentation/parport.txt in your kernel sources, or look at the parport web site.
Serial devices are usually called something like /dev/ttyS1
under Linux. The utility
stty will allow you to interactively view or set the
settings for a serial port;
setserial
will allow you to control a few extended attributes and configure IRQs
and I/O addresses for non-standard ports. Further discussion of
serial ports under Linux may be found in the
Serial-HOWTO.
When using a slow serial printer with flow control, you may find that
some of your print jobs get truncated. This may be due to the serial
port, whose default behavior is to purge any untransmitted characters
from its buffer 30 seconds after the port device is closed. The buffer
can hold up to 4096 characters, and if your printer uses flow control
and is slow enough that it can't accept all the data from the buffer
within 30 seconds after printing software has closed the serial port,
the tail end of the buffer's contents will be lost. If the command
cat file > /dev/ttyS2
produces complete printouts for short files but truncated ones for
longer files, you may have this condition.
The 30 second interval can be adjusted through the "closing_wait" commandline option of setserial (version 2.12 and later). A machine's serial ports are usually initialized by a call to setserial in the rc.serial boot file. The call for the printing serial port can be modified to set the closing_wait at the same time as it sets that port's other parameters.