All this reminds me of my printer & Ethernet card woes during the weekend. I decided that I was tired of using Linux with very limited multimedia capabilities. It seemed to reinforce the notion my Windows friends have that Linus is for servers not workstations.
I bought a SoundBlaster PCI128 card and to get that to work I had to upgrade from 2.0.36 which was working perfectly for months to 2.2.10. I downloaded the sources and compiled the kernel. I rebooted and everything seemed to work fine, but I noticed that eth0 kept on complaining. After connecting my laptop to the hub I realized that the Ethernet card in the Linux system was unhappy. Not long afterwards I saw that I couldn't print either. The Ethernet card problem was easily solved. A reboot to Windows showed that Windows had somehow told it to use the wrong I/O address, even though PnP is turned off. The printer was more tricky. It worked fine under Windows. After messing around with cables documentation and stuff I decided to strace the daemon. I saw it try to talk to lp1 instead of lp0. I looked at /etc/printcap and realized that I had lp1 in there. I read some more and saw that the lp implementation has been changed quite a bit from the 2.0 to 2.2. If I had lp0 in /etc/printcap none of this would have happened. What's my point - getting a Linux system to work perfectly requires patience and a lot of RTFM. This is unlike Windows where some (but not all) things will work with minimal user interaction. But the time I have spent making Linux work always pays off as it continues working with no problems. Till I touch it again ... Now I am going home to figure out why IP forwarding has stopped working with 2.2. jmb >The whole point is that things can work just fine. It does take a little >patience and there's lots to learn. > >When it comes to documentation there is alot available and not just >online. The Debian Users Guide is a must and there are many other books >available too. Also, the Debain user help is great. People from this list >have spent much time helping me out with little snags here and there. >When you have troubles just ask. That is what this list is for. > >>>My printer works fine. My modem works fine. The documentation has >>>always been right on and the installation is a breeze. >>> >>Doug-- Run out and buy a Lotto ticket. Lady luck has the hots for >>you! :-) --- Max
