The ftape software comes in two different flavors; stable and unstable. You are probably going to have to download the latest unstable version and then rebuild your kernel with ftape 2.x support disabled and enable the ftape 4.x unstable support to get this working. I know definitely this is something I'll have to do since I have a trakker tape drive hanging off the parallel port. For support with ftape, ftape at vger.kernel.org is the main mailing list and vger.kernel.org is either a listserv or majordomo server, I haven't used it for so long I forgot.
