I have a parallel<->USB converter that I recently purchased.  It was made
by Inland.  It seems to at least partially work, but not entirely.  (the
NetBSD version is the 1.5 release.)

The uhub is a VIA Technologie[sic] UHCI.

ulpt0 attaches as

ulpt0 at uhub0 port 1 configuration 1 interface 0
ulpt0 vendor 0x0832 product 0x5850, rev 1.00/1.04, addr 2, iclass 7/1


The behavior is that it attaches (as noted).  Attempts to print to it give
either paper-out errors, or I/O errors.  As far as I know, the printer is
functioning correctly, but it was an old printer that has been gathering
dust for a while.  (It _did_ beep about a lack of paper whe I first
turned it on---because it didn't have any paper at the time...(^&)

I've tried cycling the power on the printer, and since I was removing
USER_LDT from my kernel (i386, BTW...), I also rebooted.  The behavior is
the same, it seems, whether the ulpt is hot-plugged, or connected at boot.

So, before I bother cycling the power on the machine (to connect to the
parallel port on the PC---I am not of a mind to hot-plug parallel
devices; (^&), I thought that I'd ask if anyone had any experiences with
these Inland USB<->parallel converters.  Are they known to be weird?  (The
connector came with an MS-WINDOWS driver disk, so maybe it doesn't conform
(quite) to the USB spec for printers?)  Or does it sound like something
that needs a trivial tweak to the NetBSD USB driver?


  "I probably don't know what I'm talking about." --rauch@eecs.ukans.edu