Printer Troubles

I have a printer setup which gets frustrating. There is no telling if my old HP4L (now with a USB-to-parallel adapter cable) will be recognised by Ubuntu and at which USB port. I can detect no pattern to the misbehaviour or to how to get it to be recognised again beyond deleting the printer, restarting, and reintroducing the USB cable to a naive Ubuntu.

The printer is found as "unknown".

To rename it takes:

sudo gedit /etc/cups/printers.conf

and a restart of cups as:

/etc/init.d/cupsys restart

I also discovered simple cups administration at:

http://localhost:631/

Maybe there's a better way of training my printer?