[Sussex] Printers and Gentoo (again)

[Stephen Williams]

On Sun, 2004-11-28 at 20:43 +0000, John D. wrote:
> 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.

Have a look for /dev/par0 - 2 for parallel printer port devices.

Have a look in dmesg for the following to see if parallel support is
compiled into your kernel;

lp: driver loaded but no devices found
...

parport0: PC-style at 0x378 (0x778) [PCSPP,TRISTATE]
lp0: using parport0 (polling).
....




> 
> 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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