Freebsd 4.9, 5.1 & 5.2

[Lowell Gilbert]

William Segars <wcsegars at yahoo.com> writes:

> I am having trouble with freebsd 4.9, 5.1, and 5.2. 
> Neither of them recognizes my printer or floppy drive.
>  I am a BSD novice and use KDE as a graphical
> interphase.

I'm guessing that your problems have more to do with KDE than with
FreeBSD per se; this is worth checking into so you can focus on the
most knowledgeable help available.  [which is to say I don't know 
much about KDE...]

> 1) I have a Canon BJC-210.  I have downloaded and
> installed Cups, Aspfilter, asfilter, ghostscript etc
> and none of these recognizes my printer.
> 
> I get this message on bootup
> ppc0: (parallel port) at port 0x378-0x37F irq 7 on ISA
> ppbus0: (parallel portbus) on ppc0
> 1pt0: (printer) on pp bus 0
> pp0: (parallel I/O) on ppbus 0
> 
> However it doesn't seem to know my printer is there
> when I try to print.

Printing from the command line?
If you can print from the command line (e.g., "lpr /etc/rc.conf"),
then the printer is set up fine and your problem is getting your
applications to understand it.  I don't have any problems with that,
but you may be trying something KDE specific.

> 2) I get this message at bootup
> fd0: (1440-kb 3.5 drive) on fdc drive 0
> 
> However, I can't access the floppy drive.  When I
> create an Icon and put the path /dev/fd/fd0. I can't
> access the floppy.

Again, if you can do it from the command line 
("mount -t msdos /dev/fd0c /mnt/floppy" on 4.x), the OS is working
fine.   

> 3) I use efax and have kdefax and tkfax as my
> frontend.
> My modem is configured in kde as cuaa0.  Efax uses
> "modem" as a default.  How can I change it to cuaa0. 
> In the execution file at /usr/local/bin/fax - it has a
> line that says 
> DEV=modem
> #DEV=cuaa1
> when I change it to #Dev=cuaa0 - it makes no
> difference.  
> The only way I have found around this is to go to
> /dev/cuaa0 (using graphical interphase) - pull it out
> to my desktop and using link application.  I change
> the name to "modem" and put it back (there is now both
> a cuaa0and modem in /dev.  Then I'm able to send
> faxes.  However, there is no way to save this
> configuration and when I turn off my computer it
> resets to the original settings 

Sounds like a devfs issue on 5.x.  I'm not using 5.x yet, but I think
there's a "devfs.conf"  that can configure this for you.