After much deliberation I have bought a printer, to replace my faithfull
but worn out HP760C. It is supported on Linux (HP P1005) and I even
managed to download the hplip-2.8.4 and followed the default
installation. Which ofcourse failed miserably because Slackware is not
in the list of distributions and then the /etc/rc.d library is not found
or such and such.

So I found this site:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/...Slackware_10_2

Which I followed religiously up until the point where it says to copy
the hplip.sh to /etc/rc.d. But I could derive from the discussion that I
didn't need to do anything, since I have the old rc.hplip which had the
changes (as has rc.M).

Now after 'only' 20 retries I was able to print out the testpage, put
the printer in Samba and was able to print from a Windoze XP box. So I
thought I was home free. So it does work!

Now today I wanted to print a document and to my great dismay the
printer doesn't print. The various pages I visited have shown me ways to
confirm that the kernal does indeed see the module (yes, I have editted
rc.modules to enable usb-printer) and the USB device in /proc/dev (or
was it /dev/usb/devices ... or both) neatly show the printer and I am
indeed able to place the printer in CUPS with localhost:631. But however
I try, no prints come out of it. So it doesn't work!!???

dmesg shows:
hub.c: new USB device 00:0b.1-2, assigned address 8
printer.c: usblp0: USB Bidirectional printer dev 8 if 0 alt 0 proto 2
vid 0x03F0 pid 0x3D17
when I unplug/plug the device but as soon as I try to print a page it says:
printer.c: usblp0: removed

Which in other words tells me that the printer has been disconnected.

This is quite frustrating as you might appreciate, and now my question
is: how can I make my Linux like my printer in such a way that it is not
a lottery if I can print...

I'm on 11.0, kernel 2.4.33.3

Thanks,

Cor