Re: switching between CUPS and PLIP?
On February 28, 2003 03:04 am, ScruLoose wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm interested in installing woody on this hand-me-down P133 laptop that a
> friend's mom is no longer using, and it has neither CD-ROM drive nor NIC,
> so I'm thinking I'll try the install-over-plip thing. Now, most of the
> process is documented fairly well in a HOWTO that I found, but I'm left
> with a couple of questions. Presumably, on my desktop box with its one
> parallel port, I'll need to unload lp before loading plip, so that plip can
> 'own' the parallel port.
> Right?
Yes. The only way it can't work is if lp is compiled into the kernel, which
is not a standard option.
As for switching back and forth between plip and printing, I have the
requisite commands contained in shell scripts called plip-on.sh and
plip-off.sh. Basically to switch back to printing, it's just removing the
plip module and inserting lp again, which can be done with modprobe or
insmod/rmmod. I'll give you a reference to those shell scripts in a moment.
One fun way you could accomplish your task would be to start with a minimal
floppy distro just to get plip going, then just copy an entire filesystem
either over the minimal distro or on a new partition. I've done this on a
couple old 386's and posted my experience at:
http://www.superant.com/cgi-bin/smalllinux.pl?Small_Linux_Notes_By_Levi_Waldron
Even if you don't use a minimal floppy distro to get started, this will guide
you through the plip process. It's a great way to gain an understanding of
the basics of how a GNU/Linux OS works, because a floppy distro is so much
simpler than a full distro that things are more obvious. At the end of my
smalllinux posting there are links to a couple floppy images that make using
that tiny distro easier, and have plip-on.sh and plip-off.sh, which may or
may not work "out of the box" for you. The annoying thing about using a tiny
distro like that are that because it's so stripped down it may be missing
tools you need, and have no easy way of compiling for the old kernel and
libraries. I spent a bunch of time finding compatible binaries of those
modules and programs, with the contents of those added floppies I made, it's
easy.
-Levi
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