grant@torque.net
Sun, 1 Nov 1998 11:15:58 -0500 (EST)
> Pat's last comment on this subject (some months ago) was that he felt
> he had built the boot image correctly. I rather doubt he views this
> as a pressing issue either - I am probably the only advocate of bpcd
> that he's been pestered by...
Ok, let me try to unravel some things here. First of all, building a
slackware boot disk is no big deal, unless something has changed recently.
Slackware boot disks are just monolithic kernel images.
Secondly, "bpcd" was never an official Linux driver. It was an experimental
driver that RedHat agreed to include in the installer as a favour to me.
Unfortunately, they weren't able to keep up with the updates to the old
bpcd driver, so what they've been shipping doesn't really work on a lot
of drives.
Technical aside: bpcd only worked with drives that started at full speed.
The newer 8x and higher speed drives have a long (up to 10 seconds) warm
up period before they will accept commands. The PARIDE pcd driver handles
this - but the old one couldn't. That's why RedHat says it only works
with the 4x drives.
2.0.35 and recent 2.1 kernels support the PARIDE suite officially.
Unfortunately, there was a tiny error in the bpck module in 2.0.35
that caused trouble on some older parallel ports that did not support
EPP. That was fixed in the 2.1 kernels - and also in the pending 2.0.36.
Returning to Slackware, you should be able to build a 2.0.36 kernel
with support for PARIDE, pcd and bpck, and make a boot disk from that.
I don't know if Pat's root image contains the PARIDE device nodes, so
you may need to mknod /dev/pcd0 yourself from a root shell.
If you have a channel to Pat, I'd be happy to work with him to sort out
any problems he has with PARIDE, and to test his installers. Unfortunately,
I've never succeeded in making e-mail contact with him.
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Grant R. Guenther grant@torque.net
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Wed 30 Dec 1998 - 10:18:43 EST