As you know, I'm not overly familiar with RedHat, but there are a few possibilties here from the off.
(1) Do the lp0 and lp1 device nodes actually exist?
Yes AFAIK they are present in /dev and they were there physically last time I looked! Someone could have been at my motherboard with a hacksaw but I'm pretty sure I'd have noticed. :-) As I said both ports work in Dos??
(2) Do you have permission to write to the nodes? If you type 'echo test >/dev/lp0' and it comes back with 'Permission denied', then you need to check the permissions of the lp devices to give yourself write access - you may well find, if redhat is anything like debian that the nodes are all in groups, so you can just add yourself to the 'lp' group. If it comes back as 'Device does not exist', then one of the following is likely to be the cause...
I get `No such device'
(3) Do they have the correct major and minor node numbers? When you do 'ls -l /dev/lp*', you should get the following:
crw-rw---- 1 root lp 6, 0 Mar 3 1999 /dev/lp0 crw-rw---- 1 root lp 6, 1 Mar 3 1999 /dev/lp1 crw-rw---- 1 root lp 6, 2 Mar 3 1999 /dev/lp2 Your permissions and owner/group may be different, however the '6, #' should be the same, afaik.
I get
[root@bj /root]# ls -l /dev/lp* crw-rw---- 1 root daemon 6, 0 May 5 1998 /dev/lp0 crw-rw---- 1 root daemon 6, 1 May 5 1998 /dev/lp1 crw-rw---- 1 root daemon 6, 2 May 5 1998 /dev/lp2
(4) Has your kernel got parallel port support built in? You may well find that parallel support is compiled as a module, in which case you should be able to add it to whichever file controls boot time module loading (/etc/modules.conf?). Assuming that the version of RH you're running has a 2.2.x kernel, you need to make sure that both 'parallel port support', and 'pc style hardware' are enabled in the kernel
setup.
How do I find out if parellel port support has been compiled as a module? Makefile somewhere? I think it is compiled as a module and I'm pretty sure that pc style hardware is compiled as a module because make xconfig shows it that way. I reckon I'll have to recompile my kernel. Why RH 6.1 doesn't do this by default I don't know. I seem to remember reading about some install patches being available, might be worth a look.
Cheers,
BJ
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