The place to look for answers to questions about parallel port devices is
http://www.torque.net/linux-pp.html
But, unfortunately there's not a lot of good news about tape drives at this
time. There's a link on that page to a driver for the Colorado "tracker"
drives. There's also a link to my notes about some work I did with the
Ditto 800. That was 18 months ago, and I've yet to return to look at it
again, although I do have some additional information and experience.
On a more positive note, I've just completed a driver for the parallel port
version of the new Hewlett Packard "HP 5GB" drive, which forms a part
of the PARIDE suite of drivers. The 5GB drive is actually an ATAPI tape
drive with an integral 'EPAT' parallel port adapter from Shuttle
Technology. I've added a high-level ATAPI tape driver to the PARIDE suite.
In principle, it ought to work with other parallel port ATAPI tapes
(such as the backpack 8000td). There aren't too many of this class of
drive around yet. I expect the new 'pt' driver to appear in 2.1.82 or 83.
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Grant R. Guenther grant@torque.net
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