Re: Printer and Zip drive don't work together.

Matthew Vanecek (mev0003@unt.edu)
Thu, 20 May 1999 02:59:46 +0000


Steffen Kluge wrote:
>
> On Tue, May 18, 1999 at 09:58:43PM -0500, Matthew Vanecek wrote:
> > Well, I just tried it with a different Zip drive. I switched cables
> > around, too. The zip drives both work fine. I can mount, read, write,
> > whatever, zip disks. But the pass-through refuses to work. The
> > printer seems like it's not connected. Then I unplug the Zip drive,
> > and plug the printer in, and voila!, the print queue starts spewing
> > forth in paper form.
> >
> > It's definitely not a hardware problem. I tested both on my NT box,
> > and printing, etc, works just fine through the pass-through. My only
> > option left is to believe it's something messed up in the parport code.
> > Has it changed since 2.1.x? This same setup worked in 2.1.x (well,
> > the 90s, anyhow). I'll double-check the BIOS one more time to be sure
> > the port is set up right. Hopefully I will find something I've missed
> > in there.
> >
> > BTW, this happens on 2.2.6 - 2.2.9.
>
> FYI, I'm using a printer daisy-chained to a backpack CDROM drive
> and pass-through sort of works in 2.2.5-ac6. Sort of because I
> can access the CDROM or the printer, but not simultaneously. If
> I access the CDROM while printing, for example, the printer
> immediately stops.

Hmm, that's weird.

>
> I'm just relating this as anecdotal evidence that the
> pass-through code is not entirely broken. Heck, maybe even
> simultaneous access works and I'm only doing something wrong
> (e.g. the lp driver uses irq 7 while the paride/bpck/pcd modules
> appear to be polling in 4bit mode...)
>

Not sure what happened. When I used 2.1.x series, the parport code
worked great. I was printing and writing to my zip at the same time,
and was in heaven. That was on a different, older machine, of course,
but would that make a major difference? It *shouldn't*, in my mind.

I've come to the end of my know-how on this one. I don't know how to
trace what's happening when the job get's sent to the print queue, and
from thence to the printer via the Zip drive.

> I'm about to re-subscribe to the parport mailing list, but how
> many mailing lists can one subscribe to before losing total
> control of incoming e-mail?
>
> Cheers
> Steffen.

Exactly. Procmail works wonders, of course, but still. I don't even
know they're list address. Not that I've looked very hard, but I didn't
know until yesterday that there *was* one.

Someone sent me some things to try configuring in the kernel, and I'm
going to double check that I've got those options enabled (yet again).
Let you know what happens.

-- 
Matthew Vanecek
Course of Study: http://www.unt.edu/bcis
Visit my Website at http://people.unt.edu/~mev0003
For answers type: perl -e 'print
$i=pack(c5,(41*2),sqrt(7056),(unpack(c,H)-2),oct(115),10);'
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For 93 million miles, there is nothing between the sun and my shadow
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