Mageia forum

Good morning from Brisbane, Australia

I'm setting up multiple study PC's for neighbourhood kids, including one PC with an old motherboard (still 64 bit) with a parallel port, which port is not seen by mageia1. Found a discussion of parport device on
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Printing-HOWTO/kernel.html

Following on from that, discovered that mageia has neither /etc/modules.conf, or /etc/conf.modules, but just an functionally-empty file /etc/modules. Tried adding to this the lines from the above reference:
alias /dev/printers lp
alias /dev/lp* lp
alias parport_lowlevel parport_pc

didn't make any difference. Saw the reference to turning off plug&play in BIOS, but my particular BIOS's don't give that option.
Could use some ideas on how to get mageia to recognise these parallel ports - specifically so the kids can have their own (older, parallel ) printer I have lying around, rather than just networking to my main home network printer.

Saw your request in mageia-discuss. Been a while since I've used
a parallel port printer, but I think what follows will work.

In /etc/modprobe.conf add a line with
options parport_pc irq=7 dma=3 io=0x378

The irq, dma and io address may need to be changed, if this is
not the first parallel port or it's using non-standard addresses.

In /etc/modprobe.preload add a line with
parport_pc

Either reboot, or run "modprobe parport_pc".

Turn on the printer, and check /var/log/syslog to see if it's
being recognized. If it is, then run system-config-printer.

If I remember correctly, you have to manually add the printer
specifying a uri like "parallel:/dev/lp0".

Regards, Dave Hodgins

Thankyou Dave,
Unexpected problem. Your config stuff all worked, reboot and syslog looked OK. Tried manually adding a printer after putting "parallel:/dev/lp0" in the URI box. It dropped me into the old dialog screens I distantly remember in Mandriva (haven't had to do that in a while!) with one major surprise. The next chooser windows were entirely blank - no models displayed. Ran "urpmi task-printing", ensured that task-printing-hp was included, still nothing to choose from.

Ideas?

Might be a permissions problem. Try adding the user and root to
the group called lp, logout/in, then try again.