[Sussex] Printers and Gentoo (again)

[Steve Dobson]

John

On Sun, Nov 28, 2004 at 02:14:44PM +0000, John D. wrote:
> When I try to setup my printers, I've looked at the obvious (as I
> understand it anyway).
> 
> Geoff pointed me in the right direction last time, but this time I'm
> quite confused, because when I check that theres parallel port and lp
> support, I cant see any i.e. 
> 
> bash-2.05b# modprobe paraport
> FATAL: Module paraport not found.
> bash-2.05b# modprobe lp
> FATAL: Module lp not found.
> bash-2.05b# modprobe paraport_pc
> FATAL: Module paraport_pc not found.
> bash-2.05b#
>  
> 
> But, if I cd /usr/src/linux and then do make menuconfig I start looking
> through the sections and I see
> 
> Parallel port support--> <*> Parallel port support 
> Parallel port support--> <*>   PC-style hardware 
> 
> Character Devices--> <*> Parallel printer support 
> 
> and according to the legend, the <*> indicates that "it's" built in, so
> does this mean that I have to have the paraport, paraport_pc and lp
> facilities as modules ? (or because it's "built in", modprobe shows the
> absence of modules as above?).

If a "module" is built in to the kernel then there is no separate module
file produced and therefore modprobe/lsmod/modinfo can not find a module
file upon which to work.  This is quite normal.  If you are seeing messages
like that during boot then have a look in /etc/modules and comment out
the appropriate lines.

If you are using devfs then you should see appropriate devices in /dev.

Also have a look at the kernel messages (dmesg) which shows the last 
few messages reported by the kernel (if your system has been running
for a while you make need to reboot to see the messages at boot time).
You're looking for the appropriate device message that is reported when
the device driver identifies hardware it can drive.

Steve