On Wed, 1 Mar 2000, Karl-Max Wagner wrote:
> > Well, this may not quite be the appropriate place to ask this, but I have
> > found this list very helpful in understanding how to get my parallel
> > devices to work with my Twinhead slimnote 5100c laptop (6 year old
> > 486dx4-100mhz). I have a parallel backpack cdrom and a 100mb zip drive,
> > and a scsi orb drive. I was having so much trouble with the cdrom and zip
>
> Funny. I have an older ZIP drive and it always worked - even
> with old machines and 1.2.x kernels.
>
Ok, I was not very clear with my troubles. I will start from the
beginning as others may find this helpful.
I first tried to install (red hat) Mandrake 6.0 from a cd in my backpack
cdrom. I used the boot disk for red hat 6.0 with paride support. I was
able to install everything, but recieved an error when it tried to make
either a boot disk or to make the root partition bootable, i.e. I had rh6
on my machine, but I could not boot it! So, after much poking around I
came to the conclusion that insmod failed when trying to insert loop.o
(this was the last thing the installer tried to do). So, I tried insmod
loop.o manually and got the error
loop.o compiled for kernel version 2.2.5-15 BOOT while this version is
2.2.5-14 BOOT.
(any suggestions on getting this to work? would it be better to try the
non-mandrake rh60?)
well, I also tried manually running lilo to set the kernel boot, but could
not get that to work either.
So, I tried to install Mandrake 5.2 with the rh52pp2.img and actually
managed to get linux installed on my machine. From here I was able to get
both my (parallel) zip drive and backpack cdrom to work, but not at the
same time, since parport is intended to be used with the 2.2.x kernels...
So, I next tried a debian distribution with kernel 2.2.13 but found there
was no paride support at all (that I could find even after installing from
my harddrive).
So, I considered trying to install mandrake 6.0 from my hd also, but my hd
is just under 800MB and not quite enough to copy enough of the cdrom and
have enough space left over for the installed packages. I also
encountered trouble with the long filenames of the packages, as I had only
had dos6.22 to boot with. Anyway it just seemed like all to much data
shuffling.
So, I bought a SCSI ORB drive thinking the additional space and improved
interface would solve all my problems (I did not do enough research on
the ORB before my impulse buying, being a scsi device, I expected it
to just work with a standard scsi kernel and no additional drivers). I
also managed to find an evaluation copy of SuSE on CD. Well, I didn't
need any special boot disk to install it as SuSE supports paride and the
backpack cdrom with it installation. But, for some reason a couple files
did not transfer properly and I ended up reinstalling from the hd
again. This worked just fine and I then got linux up and running once
again, but now with kernel 2.2.13.
So, I managed to get parport to work with both the (parallel) cdrom and
zip drive. But, I have yet to get the SCSI ORB to work.
Well, to try the orb under dos, I installed the scsi driver for the
adapter in my i/o slice & port replicator (aspi2dos.sys) and it told me
the following:
scsi Host Adapter Adaptec AIC-6360 Family adapter - port 340h
channels: 1
targets: 8
IO port: 340h
IO len: 32
IRQ: 11
ISA DMA: -1
I was able to partition and format the ORB disk as fat16 and 2gig in size
and even able to copy files to and from the drive. So I know the drive
works.
now, I am confused as to why the orb needs paride. I do know from
Castlewood (orb manufacturer) that, even though it uses a scsi interface,
it is actually an ide drive. But it does not use the parallel port.
Is it just because the on26 module is dependent on paride? and is the
on26 necessary to assign the drive a mounting point? (side note: I
noticed that after installing the scsi driver in dos, I ran the iomega
guest program to assign a drive letter to the zip drive and it also
assigned a drive letter to the orb drive.)
> > installing the dos driver, it finds an Adaptec AIC-6360 Family Adapter -
> > Port 340h. I noticed there is scsi support for the AIC 7xxx adapters. Is
> > there any way to get the AIC-6360 to work with linux?
>
> The AIC6360 is a widespread chip in a lot of boards. Its first
> use were the Adaptec AHA152x adapters. For 6360 support simply
> use the aha152x.o module ( has been around for a long time... ).
>
OK, I tried to insmod aha152x.o but only got the message
device or resource is busy
Any ideas why? Do I need to specify the io port and irq (and how)? If I
do get the aha152x.o module running, how does parport deal with the scsi
interface? How do I tell paride where the orb drive is? Does the orb
use an irq? And how does the scsi id relate? Could there be any
conflicts with the ppa module?
I know the zip drive uses id 6 and the adapter should use id 7. Last
night I tried the aha152x with zipslack (slackware linux under 100mb) with
the orb drive id 0 and id 4 (could also be 5 or 6).
Well, I realize this is pretty long, but I have tried to figure this on my
own as much as possible... Thank you for any insight any of you may have!
matthew
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