And so the saga continues.....we have made some progress, albeit the long way round
I thought perhaps my problem with CUPS might be caused by something not loading properly/me deleting it/the sort of things one does when one has no idea what one is doing. So I "reinstalled" Cups with Gslapt. This made no difference so I decided to "uninstall" CUPS and then "install" it. Which was what I intended. But for some reason I can't figure out, Gslapt decided it would uninstall all the packages on the computer. Probably my own fault, who knows?
As I had no idea what was on there in the first place, and all my stuff had been backed up, I decided to do a complete reinstall- after all, I'd learned some things now, and things would be much better this time around. Duh!
It's taken me two weeks to get my wireless conection back up, so I couldn't get CUPS configured. Anyway, it's working okay at the moment (til I do something daft). But I still can't print.
But it's not all bad! Cups will now let me configure the printer and the printer pulls a page up ready to print, I wait 4 - 10 mins while Cups sends the test page and ...nothing. I've also tried printing a document on this laptop. Cups acknowledges it, but still won't print. I've also tried 3 different drivers off the list, including a foomatic/hpijs 2.8.12.26, no result. I've tried setting to greyscale and print black (the dj 400 only takes one cartridge at a time and it's current one is black). When I press the paper feed, it does print a nice line of smileys and hearts, but I don't think that's the test page- just the printer being friendly.
CUPS shows the URI as parallel:/dev/lp0. I do have a dev/lp0, but there's nothing written in it. However, now CUPS is co-operating, Im hoping the solution will be easier to find and probably involves something being set/ not set on this computer. Any ideas, chaps?
Oh, something else that's written in my notes- when I tried to read lp0 when CUPS was attempting to print, I got a message "failed to open device dev/lp.0 Device or resource busy"