Grrrr....Debian woody vs. HP 722C...

Maybe switching to Debian wasn't such a good idea afterall. Who would have guessed that it would take this much effort just to get an HP Deskjet printer up and running. Apparently, Debian comes with no tools to do this with. First, I tried CUPS, but that did not work. Then I tried installing hp-ppd, mpage, and printtool. printtool tells me that I have no support for a parallel port in my kernel (I do), or that it isn't working (it is, according to dmesg, anyway). Plus printtool does not show that there is a filter for my printer, even though I have the latest hp-ppd. I'm starting to think that Debian has kind of sucky printer support. Anybody out there have a similar problem with Debian?