Installing zipdrive on RHEL 3
 

I have a zip 100(parallel port) drive which I want to install on redhat enterprise linux 3 system. I have never done this and have no clue how to go about this.

can someone let me know how to accomplish this?

what drivers to install, installation instructions, mounting instructions etc.

adetailed document if available would be of great help.

Thanks

ppa
 

The module you want is ppa

Just add 'modprobe ppa' to your startup scripts. I'm not quite sure how redhat does it, since I haven't used redhat for quite a while. If you don't want to see some crazy error messages when you reboot, leave a disk in the drive as well, when you have the drive connected and powered up.

After you do that, insert your zipdisk, then do a 'mount /dev/sda4 <mountpoint>'

Don't ask me why it's sda4, it's an Iomega thing. That's just the default location for a DOS formatted Zip disk.

Add some entries to your 'fstab' file as well. Something like:

/dev/sda4 /mnt/zipdrive vfat noauto,users 0 0

would work pretty good.

what startup script are you talking about?

rc.modules
 

I'm not sure about redhat, but in Slackware, the startup scripts are located in /etc/rc.d There might be something similar in redhat, perhaps /etc/rc.d/init.d/.. blah blah. I'm sure there's some GUI in redhat that does system configuration for you.

To check if it works, open a shell with root privileges. Connect the drive up, power it on, stick in a disk. At the shell prompt, type in, 'modprobe ppa' Some messages should go scrolling up. If that works, you can try mounting the disk. Make a temporary directory, say /mnt/zipdrive Then, to mount it, type 'mount -t vfat /dev/sda4 /mnt/zipdrive' If something is on the disk, you should be able to see it now with 'ls /mnt/zipdrive'

If that doesn't work, then you'll have to compile a kernel with generic scsi support and the ppa module (another topic far far far beyond getting a zip drive up and running), but I'm fairly certain redhat has it precompiled in to the default kernel. Good luck!

apparently, ppa shipped with redhat 6.1. (i know this from googling)
i'm completely new to red hat so I don't know about all the other versions and distros. and all the other links for finding it at
cyberelk-dot-net/tim/parport/parport-dot-html
are dead.