Let's sort a few things out here. I agree that it is unreasonable for a new user to compile a kernel; the choices are many and varied. The problem you are facing is that there are 2 ways to talk to ide/atapi devices. let me demonstrate: Let us assume we have an ide burner to start with. If you compile in ide-cdrom support and scsi emulation; you get the writer controlled by the atapi cdrom driver. This is not what you want since the burning process requires scsi commands to be sent to the atapi device (which happens under windows too btw) and you need the emulation layer for this. The same holds true for the zip drive; without scsi emulation you get it showing as an atapi floppy disk. it does work in this mode; but you can't use the ziptools to lock a disk in the drive set passwords etc. I would guess that what slackware has done is compiled ide-scsi emulation as a module. All you must do in this case is specify hdd=noprobe then load the ide-scsi module after boot. you'll see your burner show up as scsi device 0,0,0 (bus,id,lun) and you can then do something like cdrecord -v speed=n dev=0,0,0 image The reason you compile ide cdrom support into your distribution kernel and not scsi emulation is so that the installer can read the cds to install the data; and a few old cdrom drives do not work with scsi emulation. See if you have a module called ide-scsi.o in /lib/modules/kernel-version/block (or is it scsi not sure) and modprobe it to get scsi emulation after giving the kernel the hdd=noprobe option. If the atapi cdrom driver has hdd the ide-scsi driver can't have it. hdd=noprobe tells the ide subsystem not to probe for hdd on boot so the cdrom driver won't find the drive which is what we want. The same holds true for an atapi tape drive but you use ide-tape instead of ide-scsi. Note that linux will talk to tape drives; zip drives; floppies; super-floppies; cdr and cdrw; worm; magneto optical and most others that can go on an atapi bus; also the floppy tape streamers work as well as the external parallel versions of cdrw and tape drives. Given a day or two we could probably hook all your backup devices to your linux box and have them work flawlessly. Linux has better out of the box backup support than windows 9x and probaly 2k and xp; problem is it takes initial setup to get it to run. Regards, Kerry. On Thu, Dec 26, 2002 at 04:26:15AM -0500, Jude DaShiell wrote: > When I booted into linux with linux hdd=ide-scsi, the boot up process > never made it to rc.local. This leads me to the conclusion that speakup.i > has scsi emulation disabled in slackware 8.0. That would explain this > failure and my additional speculation is that the builder of speakup.i if > he uses it on his own computer is backing his system up on 1.44mb floppy > disks. For sure nothing else can be used as a backup medium unless zip > disks are used. Linux is now about as expensive as windows over here not > because of screen reader technology but more because of all the failed -- Kerry Hoath: kerry at gotss.net kerry at gotss.eu.org or kerry at gotss.spice.net.au ICQ: 8226547 msn: kerry at gotss.net Yahoo: kerryhoath at yahoo.com.au
