[rhelv6-list] Parallel Port Support

[Lamar Owen]

On Friday, June 17, 2011 11:09:44 AM Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> a) RHEL-6 has many requirements requiring newer computers
> b) Those newer computers do not have parallel ports
> c) the newer computers that have parallel ports support them usually
> via some kludged up emulation mode which breaks in odd ways.
....
> Combine those together and if you are going to use parallel printers
> you are most likely going to be using the older RHEL releases and less
> likely to jump that old P-III to EL6.

Good morning, Smooge.... 

I have several boxen capable of RHEL 6 that have parallel ports; I am in fact running an RHEL 6.1 box at the moment (until I do some crossgrades) with a parallel port.  I've not actually tested the port, but I have no reason to suspect it doesn't work.  Motherboard is a SuperMicro P4DP6, and has dual Xeon 2.8GHz processors (last core before EM64T, so no x86_64 support) and 4GB of ECC RAM.  Has a nice and functional parallel port on the Super I/O chip connected to the LPC bus on the ICH3-S SouthBridge.  We have a Dell Precision 670 with dual 3.4GHz Xeons (that are x86_64 capable) with a functional parallel port.  My docked Dell Precision M65 (Core 2 Duo x86_64) has a parallel port (on the dock).  I've used the Dell 670's parallel port, and it seems to work fine.

Now, don't get me wrong; I'm not sad to see parallel ports themselves go away.  But machines that otherwise are well within the RHEL 6 hardware guidelines still can have functional parallel ports..... And we have a few larger-format printers that only have parallel ports.... fortunately one DesignJet 750C+ has a JetDirect...

:-)

But, having said all that, Fedora as of F14 still has the lp.ko driver.  Again, I'd love to see the full technical rationale (which probably starts with your list above) but which is not covered by any of the bugzillas on the topic.

Reference:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=713827
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=635968