[openbeos] Re: parallel driver
- From: François Revol <revol@xxxxxxx>
- To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 28 Mar 2002 14:42:59 +0100 (MET)
> Bear in mind that the ioctl in R5 seems to be broken as it doesn't
> always
> pass back the correct error value, so we're having to add parameters to
> all
> the structures to pass the error value back.
>
> david
I didn't know about this, is it experience or did you read about this
elsewhere ? Btw This is one thing to be corrected in R1 :)
I only found a strange ioctl behaviour here, but it doesn't talk about errors:
http://bang.dhs.org/be/bebook/Drivers/writing_drivers.html
this page also has some useful infos for block devices:
http://bang.dhs.org/be/bebook/bebook-new.html
I searched with Google but didn't find anything.
Except the alsaplayer author wrote BeMP:
http://www.alsaplayer.org/ChangeLog
(hey, an Alsa port would be nice wouldn't it ? -- GE stuff anyway)
> There are a couple of these in progress (parallel ports).
> I would have to see what Thomas is doing (I haven't looked) to see
> how well the drives (Zip, etc) could/would work with this.
Ok, let me know. If I understand correctly, the Zip // driver emulates SCSI
through the // port. This way we should just use a standard scsi driver to
control it if we forward the scsi commands from the scsi bus manager to the //
port.
> OTOH, parallel is, very much, a dying technology. We should do it, I think,
> but I wouldn't put a whole ton of thought into it, since it is the past and
> not the future.
Yeah, this is proly why it's so convoluted :))))
Anyway this port can still be very useful, and lots of old boxes don't have
USB, as lots of printers.
I find the idea of "legacy free" PC stupid, that won't really drop the cost,
but will prevent geeks from expanding their PC easily (just like dropping ISA
for PCI only, not everybody can make 4 layers PCBs... although removing ISA
would certainly lower the cost a bit :)).
But I think they should first have a look at the price they charge for the
software instead of trying to rip every cent from hardware... (just put BeOS or
Linux ... this will remove 1/3 of the price :^))
(and I suspect they want to use USB and the likes to enforce the use of their
**** DRM things... the presence of an "non secure" port on the PC would be
dangerous for them... Yeah don't laugh it's the future they are preparing for
us :-( At least for now those silly software patents aren't legal here... *
until when ?*)
François.
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