Printing problems

[Samuele Catusian <samuele.catusian@studenti.ing.unipi.it>]

Hi all. I'm new to this ml, and first of all I want to thank the authors 
of dosemu and the entire community for the nice work done.

I'm using dosemu for several months and lately I had a problem with a
parallel printer which doesn't want to print at all.
There are no problems under GNU/Linux: I use lpr on Debian Woody and it
prints nicely. dosemu (version 1.0.2.1 packaged for Debian Woody,
package revision 7) runs MS-DOS 6.22 and the program I use just talks
to a dot-matrix printer which supports the IBM ProPrintIII protocol. I
already tuned-up many times this boxes under various hardware
configurations, and the printer never needed particular configurations
(i.e. the $_ports entry in dosemu.conf was always empty).
This time I played with the values in dosemu.conf, according to the BIOS
settings and the /proc/ioports entries about the parallel port, but
nothing happens.
I also played with the kernel (a vanilla 2.4.20 from kernel.org) parport
section many times, and it seems to be ok. I can print text files both
with lpr and echo-ing on /dev/lp0.
My current dosemu parameters are:

$_printer = "lp"	# which is properly configured in /etc/printcap
$_printer_timeout = (20)
$_ports = "device /dev/lp0 fast range 0x378 0x37f"

That's the output of # cat /proc/ioports | grep parport

0378-037a : parport0
037b-037f : parport0

They are perfectly matching the BIOS settings (the mobo is an Asus
P4B533, which I suppose have a standard BIOS). I tried to restrict the
range to 0x378-0x37a in the BIOS: /proc/ioports was ok, lpr worked fine,
but dosemu doesn't. 

It seems to be a dosemu (or perhaps MS-DOS) problem, because also doing
a "copy config.sys lpt1" at the dos prompt it doesn't print.

Of course, lpd is up and running.

Any help, hint or link would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

-- 
Samuele Catusian                                
http://studenti.ing.unipi.it/~s244797/          -o)      ,''`.
                                                 /\      : :' :
                                                _\_V     `. `'
Debian GNU/Linux: when you have to do other                `-
important things than fixing a system.