Hi fellow Yoper'ers. I installed Yoper 2.1 a week or so ago, and now have had enough time to try out all of my physical devices. I have managed to get access to my USB memory stick and to my Firewire harddrive, but I cannot figure out where my Zip drive is. Physically, it is an internal IDE drive, and so I expected it to be /dev/hdb. No luck. Does anyone out there have an internal IDE Zip drive? What magic "/dev/name" entry do I need to use in fstab to get access to it? Thanks!

One other item. I have noted that Midnight Commander (a favorite old ncurses based dual pane file manager) creates very odd screen displays. Everywhere where it is trying to draw lines and boxes, I get very oddball characters showing up (on Konsole, xterm, aterm, all of them). It seems to me like I must be using the wrong default character set or some such, but this is WAY over my head. Has anyone else had this problem? ALL of my ncurses based programs behave this way, not just Midnight Commander. Any and all insights MUCH appreciated. Thanks again!

If you run MC from the Konsole, using a menu: New MC window (or similar) it should look fine.
They screwed up something with the encoding for MC in Yoper. I guess it uses Unicode, even if current
locales state different.
If you choose the right keymap, you should also see MC without junk on the screen in the system console.
I couldn't get it right in any terminal emulator just by using 'mc'. Dunno why, but it's a common problem.

Abiut the ZIP drive, can't help - never used it.

Plug the Zip drive in and then type in dmesg in a shell - that should give you a clue what the device is allocated as :-)
I would think it will be seen as a removeable device - so /dev/sd something rather than as a hard drive.

Hi All, thanks for the advice. Midnight Commander works great if you use the Konsole "New Midnight Commander" selection. Any idea what this selection does, or where it is configured? Clearly it runs mc, but it must do something else to enable the right character support (perhaps unicode as suggested by one poster). Anyway, I would like to have a look, so that I can get my other ncurses based programs working.

On the Zip disk, thanks for the dmesg pointer. Duh! I should have thought of that myself. Only been doing linux for less than a year; I will excuse my stupidity on that grounds! :-) Anyway, sure enough, the Zip drive was well represented there. It is found as hdb, and listed as a Zip 100 ATAPI drive. Unfortunately, I still can't access it. /dev/hdb1 and /dev/hdb4 still say "not a valid block device" when I attempt to mount (with a zip disk in the drive, of course). After some more online research, I tried adding "hdb=ide-scsi" to the Grub line that boots Yoper, and then looking for the Zip drive as /dev/sda1 or /dev/sda4. Still no joy. Is there some kernel module that I need to insert to make this go? Anyone with any experience of an Internal ATAPI Zip 100? Thanks!

Yes, same here with MC. If i start it from Konsole's menu or from kDE's main menu it looks fine, but not from 'mc' command. I tried to follow instructions from MC's manual to fix it but with no luck. So i just leave Konsole opened with two tabs - root MC and user MC - in it and forget about this problem.

What command are you using to actually get the drive to mount?
E.g to mount a ext2 formatted drive ( called /dev/hdb1) to /mnt/drive, first create the mount point ( /mnt/drive in this case), then from a shell do -
mount -t ext2 /dev/hdb1 /mnt/drive

It may be worth adding the device to your fstab - that makes life a lot easier for you

Well, one mystery solved. I checked out the configuration of Konsole, and discovered the key difference with what it does with its "New Midnight Commander" selection and regular operation. Bottom line: set TERM to xterm, and all is well. For some reason, in Yoper, the default is TERM = linux. So, I put the following:

export TERM=xterm

into my .bashrc, and now Midnight Commander and all my other ncurses apps draw screens properly. Hope this helps a few folks out there!

For the Zip drive, yup, I have been putting it into fstab; didn't realize I could mount without it! I'll have to try that! In fstab, I have put:

/dev/hdb1 /mnt/zip vfat users,rw 0 0
/dev/hdb4 /mnt/zip vfat users,rw 0 0
/dev/sda1 /mnt/zip vfat users,rw 0 0
/dev/sda4 /mnt/zip vfat users,rw 0 0

and then tried commands "mount /dev/hdb1", "mount /dev/hdb4", "mount /dev/sda1" and "mount /dev/sda4". I even tried an sdb set of entries, just in case. No joy in every case.

I'm starting to suspect that Yoper is missing some key kernel module to allow all this to work. The device works just fine under SuSE Linux 9.0, which is the dual boot on my machine, being identified as /dev/hdb4.

Anyone with Yoper experience of internal ATAPI Zip 100s - I would love to hear from you! Thanks!

Thank you very much, mac57, you helped me to solve an MC problem.