[Sussex] Gentoo and printers?

[Geoffrey John Teale]

John,

OK.  Here goes.

First check for loaded modules.  To do this pull up a terminal and type
the following:

lsmod

... this command lists the modules currently loaded.  If you're kernel
has parallel support compiled as modules then you would expect to see
the following lines somewhere in the output:

lp                     11044  0
parport_pc             35680  1
parport                42216  2 parport_pc,lp

.. note that the names on the right hand side show modules that are
dependent on the module listed on the left hand side.

If you don't see the lines listed in your output this means that those
modules aren't currently loaded.

If this is the case the next thing to try is manually loading them.  To
do this do the following as root (or use sudo):

modprobe parport
modprobe parport_pc
modprobe lp

... if any of those modules fail to load you'll see a message like this:

FATAL: Module lp not found

.. if they all work then you have everything you need and you just need
to make gentoo load those modules automatically for you at boot time.
I'll leave that as an excercise for the reader (it's covered in the
Gentoo install guide IIRC).

If that didn't work (i.e. the modules weren't there) the you're going to
have to look at your kernel config - but I'll let you try those things
first.


-- 
Geoffrey John Teale <tealeg at member.fsf.org>
Free Software Foundation