Parallel to USB printing

Try installing the alternate USB driver "usbtb."
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1537

When you Add in printer setup, a second instance of your printer will show up with usbtb next to it. Highlight that and choose model.

Let us know how it goes.

Are you sure you installed the usbtb package? What you're describing doesn't sound right - if it (the cable) shows up as USB device it will show up with usbtb in Printer Setup.

It should just show up in the default browser. I think you have just done some good troubleshooting!
Looks like you have an OS X problem. Before reinstalling, try these steps (one at a time) -
Try Reset Printing System, a menu choice in Printer Setup Utility.
Download the 10.4.8 Combo updater from Apple and re-update.
Try Printer Setup Repair from www.fixamac.net.
Repair the hard drive by restarting from the OS X install DVD and NOT Installing, but using the Disk Utility in the Finder Menus.

Oh, I didn't notice that you'd tried the cable on other computers - reversing course here - ya, it's probably the USB-parallel cable. What brand is it?

As Greg mentioned, it may be a bad parallel to USB adapter. It also could be a bad parallel port on the printer. You mentioned in your first post that you picked up a "couple" of these printers. Do all printers act the same way with the adapter?

Despite what the developer of the usbtb software and others claim, there are and will be cases where some printers just won't work reliably with any of these adapters.

Matt

The cable is a "Bafo"
(yeah, I've never heard of it either)

I have heard of that brand. I seem to recall that there have been problems with Bafo adapters. I could be wrong, however.

I found a
"driver" for Mac, installed it... and it made it
worse.

You shouldn't need a driver. The driver is built into the usb or usbtb communications backend to the printing system. If the adapter needs an additional driver, it is not IEEE 1284 and OHCI compliant.

Matt-yes these are two separate printers (same model)

What I was trying to ask was whether you were getting the exact same problem with both of the printers. It is a more diagnostic question trying to determine if the problem was with one of the printer's parallel port or with the cable.

Matt

Sorry, yes, the same EXACT problem on with both
printers. Unfortunately I've used the same cable in
testing. I didn't think I needed anything other than
the usbtb backend (but usbtb did not show up in the
printer setup until AFTER I installed their "driver")
That being said, I can't get printer setup NOT to
hang now. 😟

FWIW, I couldn't find any Mac drivers on Bafo's site.

I don't have a solution to offer you. It is obvious that the particular cable you have will not work with your printers. The only thing I can suggest is to try a different brand of cable. They can be had for about US$15 from places such as pccables.com, TigerDirect, and NextTag. I can't guarantee that any of them will work. As I indicated before, not all printers will work with these types of adapters.

Matt

I have an Optra R+, a Mac G5, a G4 Powerbook and an Intel iMac all are connected to the internet via an ADSL router. they all print to the Optra via the ethernet, I bought an Ethernet card for the printer off e-Bay, fitted it to the printer and allocated a unique IP address to the printer so that all connected computers can print.


All the Macs are running current version of 10.4.8
Not answering your specific question but solving your ultimate problem

My experience has been that not all USB-parallel cables are created equal. I wanted to use my fine old HP Laserjet 4 Plus with my macbook pro, and my first cable (startech.com) never worked. I tried the gimp-print driver and the foomatic driver, the standard usb backend, and usbtb -- at best I could get the lights on my printer to blink. My /var/log/system.log would record various usb errors, and nothing would print.

I bought another cable today (IOGEAR GUC1284B) and it worked on the first try with the standard usb backend and the CUPS-Gutenprint driver. In particular, when I added a printer from the "Print and Fax" panel, my Mac detected the USB device correctly as a HP printer; with the other cable, it found a "IEEE 1284 cable" or whatever instead, and left it up to me to choose a driver.

My guess is that my first cable was doing an inadequate job of returning signals from the printer. Presumably there is a small chip at the fat end of these parallel-usb cables, powered by the usb port, that does the work of converting between a serial port (usb) and a parallel port (printer) -- these send their data using quite different mechanisms, so the cable actually has to do some "computing" to work. Some of these chips may well take shortcuts that don't always work.