[Sussex] Printers and Gentoo (again)

[John D.]

On Sun, 2004-11-28 at 14:42 +0000, Steve Dobson wrote:

> 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.

Well, having run dmesg as user and root, I can't see anything to
indicate that the system is seeing the printer(s) at all.

I can't be certain, but seem to recall that when I upgraded the kernel
the other day (from the 2.6.7-gentoo-r11, which was the old
gentoo-dev-sources, to 2.6.9-gentoo-r6) the info that I followed to
accomplish that little task (little for "you lot", for me, a major
event), said something about udev rather than devfs (but I don't recall
if I emerged udev) and I'm not sure how to check.

Suffice to say, I can't find any trace of the printer(s) in /dev either
i.e. nothing like /dev/lp or lpr or /dev/printer and so on.

Maybe it's gonna be better if I change things to modules by doing the
make menuconfig thing? (though I'd have thought that it's gotta be
better to have the facilities built into the kernel than use
modules ??).

I'll start ploughing through the printing guide again, because I'm
pretty sure that I should have emerged the hpijs drivers, and maybe it's
connected to the absence of that?

regards

John D.
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