Problems switching to debian
Hi,
I recently switched from Slackware to Debian, and overall I am happy with
it: in particular, configuration is much more regular than with Slackware,
and I really appreciate that.
There are still a few stubborn little problems that are actually pretty
central to my work. I'm hoping I can find help here.
1) printing is completely dead. It's as though I didn't have a printer.
Nothing I do has any affect on it. This has nothing to do with any changes I
made to my system. It's dead from the moment I install.
I have a WinBook XL (which runs linux great in general by the way) and a
DeskJet 500, as well as a parallel port iomega zip drive.
I don't think it's the zip drive, because I tried installing from scratch
without it, and it didn't help.
The only unusual thing I can think of is that when I got the printer cable,
I needed one with pins sticking out of both ends (instead of with one male
and one female connector) because that's just the way the ports are
built. The salesperson was surprised at this, but I figure the cord plugs in
so that can't be the problem.
I've recompiled both a 2.0.34 and a 2.1.126 kernel several times, with no
luck. I've looked through the Printing HOWTO, and just generally poked
around in /etc with no luck. I'm desperate.
2) The next problem I've been having is something like the screen in
minicom. The borders of the windows are drawn in weird characters as opposed
to the pseudo-graphical lines I'm used to. This is not so big a deal, but
I'd like to clear it up. In /etc/kbd/config there's what looks like a
commented out console map file, but I don't know where the rest are or how
to set different ones. I think I just need a few basic tips on what's going
on there.
3) Finally, it looks as though Expanded Plain TeX is not giving me some of
the abilities I'm used to.
In particular, \frac and \everyfootnote seems to be gone. They're there if I
put the line "\ifx\eplain\undefined \input eplain \fi" at the top of my
source file, but not if I just use the 'etex' command (even though etex runs
and seems to work except for giving errors).
In general, switching to Debian has been a really positive experience. I
just really need help with (primarily) the printing problem.
Zack
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