I have two USB-based Epson Stylus Color 480SXU printers (under two
different 1.6 i386 systems).

My printer:

 ulpt0 at uhub0 port 2 configuration 1 interface 0
 Seiko Epson USB Printer, rev 1.10/1.00, addr 2, iclass 7/1
 ulpt0: using bi-directional mode

According to LinuxPrinting.org[1], it prints "perfectly" with GIMP-Print
4.1.5 or newer.

I installed gimp-print-cups-4.2.1.tgz and cups-1.1.14nb1.tgz.

I configured CUPS for that printer (with
share/cups/model/C/escp2-480.ppd.gz).

When doing a test print (using CUPS web interface), it says "Printing page
1, 7%". Then later it says: "USB port busy; will try in 30 seconds."

I never heard the printer. The printer has no lights or display (nor any
buttons).

As suggested in CUPS docs, I increased the CUPS debugging, but it didn't
tell me much.

Is there a way to simply echo some text to that USB printer (without CUPS
nor gimp-print) to test?

I tried:

 $ echo hello > /dev/ulpt0
 bash: /dev/ulpt0: Device busy
 $ echo hello > /dev/ulpn0
 bash: /dev/ulpn0: Device busy

(The first time I tried that echo bash said something about out of
resources. Then I tried again.)

   Jeremy C. Reed
   http://www.reedmedia.net/

[1] http://www.linuxprinting.org/show_printer.cgi?recnum=317321

p.s. When I start cups, no daemons are running for first minute. I see it
runs different scripts for different printers. Then after a minute or so,
my printer made some noises (and I saw an epson script was running). I
guess it was trying to auto-configure my printer, but it didn't.