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?
And the way to do this is modprobe -r lp and then modprobe plip... yes?
Is there some way I should be informing the rest of my system that I'm
doing this (so that nothing starts attempting to print...)?
(Sorry, I'm still pretty new, and have little idea of how modules interact
with the system.)
Okay, so assuming I'm right so far: once I've got plip configured and the
install is done, and I want to re-enable printing, I'll unload the plip
module, and load lp back in.
And further, after this is done, will it be basically a question of just
modprobe-ing lp and away we go, or is this process going to wreak bloody
havoc on my CUPS setup? Is it reasonably easy to just switch back and
forth between CUPS and PLIP?
I'm not looking for it to be totally seamless... if the laptop turns out to
be of some use (and not broken, which has yet to be determined) then I'll
probably spring for an ethernet card fairly soon... but it'd be nice to
have plip networking in the meantime. However, if it's going to take this
newbie a day of reconfiguring every time I want to switch between plip and
printing, it won't really be worth doing.
Also, if anyone has any pointers to some good reading to help gain an
understanding of modules... when, why, and how to load/unload them... how
"regular executables" interact with them... what are dynamically loadable
and which only load/unload with a reboot...
(Preferably online reading, this starving student already spent *far* too
much on textbooks this year)
Thanks for any help,
-Chris
pgp00000.pgp
Description: PGP signature
