News Group Posts

Linux parallel port slow

From: "Leonard Evens" <len@math.northwestern.edu>
Subject: Re: RH7.1 -> 2.4.12
Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2001 16:25:12 -0500
References: <b170f2b4.0110142231.58545f30@posting.google.com> 

In article <b170f2b4.0110142231.58545f30@posting.google.com>, "Chris."
<nntpacct@divus.org> wrote:

> Wondering if I did this right.  I'm relatively new to doing things
> within a RedHat framework; newly concerned with things like RPM
> manageability, I'm somewhat paranoid.  Any pointers or affirmations
> would be greatly appreciated.

As Michael Yohe pointed out, you could always get the rpm package
in rawhide.redhat.com (where you have to do some searching to find it).
The last time I looked, they had 2.4.9 there.   That would be easier than
making your own kernel.

If you get a kernel from kernel.org, you should consider getting and
applying an ac patch.   These are going to be the most "RedHat
like", since Alan Cox works for RedHat.   These can be found at
kernel.org in the appropriate place under people/alan.  
But when I used the approved procedure for applying the patch,
I found that I had to rename the directory linux.vanilla because that
is what he had in the patch.

> 
> I needed functionality from the newer 2.4.x kernel (specifically, USB
> support for my Clie), but RedHat only has 2.4.3-12 on their updates
> site.  So I downloaded and installed kernel-source-2.4.3-12.i386.rpm and
> then downloaded and untar'd linux-2.4.12.tar.gz from ftp.us.kernel.org
> (this was unpacked in /root to avoid confusion).  I then copied
> /usr/src/linux-2.4/configs/kernel-2.4.3-i686.config to
> /root/linux/.config and ran `make config` which used .config for its
> defaults.  I ran through the config hitting 'enter' for pretty much
> everything, hoping the kernel would be built more or less the way RedHat
> did so, with any additional features being set to reasonably sane
> defaults.
> 
> I ran the usual litany of 'make clean / dep / bzImage / modules /
> modules_install ', going back both to comment out CONFIG_SCSI_CPQFCTS=m
> (apparently Alan Cox is aware of the 'brokeness' of this piece, and I'll
> never need it), and also to edit drivers/parport/ieee1284_ops.c in
> accordance with other instructions, to eliminate two hard errors that
> caused the build process to fail.  (Should a 'production' kernel have
> errors of this nature?)
> 
> Having built the kernel, I copied cp arch/i386/boot/bzImage to
> vmlinuz-2.4.12 in /boot and /boot_backup (different drives), built an
> initrd (I'm using dev_md in RAID1 for everything but the pair of /boot
> partitions), edited /etc/lilo.conf to create a new 'linux' image
> (renaming the default image 'linux-redhat') and ran `lilo`.
> 
> Hopefully, I have a system that isn't too "broken" as far as maintaining
> it with RPM once RedHat catches up with the kernel tree.
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> Thanks in advance!


-- 

Leonard Evens      len@math.northwestern.edu      847-491-5537
Dept. of Mathematics, Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL 60208
From - Tue Oct 16 05:58:18 2001
From: danceswithcrows@usa.net (Dances With Crows)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: Printer Settings?
Date: 16 Oct 2001 03:18:24 GMT
Message-ID: <slrn9sndb5.mf.danceswithcrows@samantha.crow202.org> 
References: <8q2nstgvkebg6ur3sug8u18c14ph4q83i0@4ax.com> 
X-Orig-Path: danceswithcrows

On Mon, 15 Oct 2001 20:28:08 -0500, Jeff staggered into the Black Sun
and said:
>I've decided to hook up my printer to the Linux box instead of my W2K
>machine (direct to LPT1), since I'm using the Linux machine as my mail,
>web, file and now, my print server.
>
>But, I notice that when printing from the W2K machine, although as fine
>in quality as when it was hooked up directly, is considerably slower in
>output.
>
>Is there a way to speed things up? I've already disabled the spool
>setting from the W2K box.

In your /etc/modules.conf , there should be a line like so:

options parport_pc io=0x378 irq=7 dma=3

This should let the parallel port use an IRQ instead of polling (speeds
things up) and if your parport is capable of doing ECP, the dma= will
let it use DMA, speeding things up even more.  The command "tunelp
/dev/lp0 -T on" may also help.

This will not help much unless the parallel port is the bottleneck.  If
the printer is "smart" (that is, you feed it PostScript, and the printer
has a rasterizer built-in) then the parallel port will be a bottleneck.
If the printer does not take PostScript, but lower-level printer control
codes, then the bottleneck may be the speed at which Ghostscript can
turn PostScript into these codes.  This process can be computationally
intensive sometimes, so moving the print engine from a 900MHz Pentium
3.5 to your sturdy old 486 can cause slowdowns.

-- 
Matt G|There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see
Brainbench MVP for Linux Admin / 
http://www.brainbench.com     /  "He is a rhythmic movement of the
-----------------------------/    penguins, is Tux." --MegaHAL
 

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