Extending the file modules.conf

Under /etc there should be either a file called modules.conf or a file called conf.modules. More often and with the more recent distributions it will be modules.conf (therefore I will be using that name in the sequel). This file contains instructions for the kernel (for modprobe and depmod to be more precise) which modules have to be loaded in case of demand. By adding appropriate amendments to modules.conf, the kernel can be instructed to automatically load the necessary modules if and only if they are needed by some application. Therefore you do not need to add explicit instruction to load the modules somewhere else but the kernel will automatically do that.

Some basic information on modules.conf can be obtained by typing man modules.conf at the command line. (This information should not be needed for the installation of the driver however.)

We therefore now add our few lines somewhere to modules.conf. For this a text editor will be helpful. I leave out explicit instructions on this point and believe that you have already chosen your favorite text editor and know how to operate it. All you have to do is add three lines (at the end of) modules.conf. I use the following:

\noindent
alias char-major-40 pt_drv
post-install pt_drv modprobe -k parport
options pt_drv lampoff=180 warmup=15 port=0x278 forceMode=2 mov=0

The first two lines will be appropriate for almost every system and can be taken as listed here. The only thing that probably needs to be adapted for your system is the third line, most likely only the part with the port parameter and perhaps the mov parameter. The port parameter specifies the address of the parallel port you have connected your scanner to. The most common values are 278 and 378. The 0x in front of it indicates, that the numbers are to be read as hexadecimal numbers and should not be omitted! So if your port address is 0x378, just write that instead of 0x278 in the above line into your /etc/modules.conf file.

In some cases you will also have to adapt the mov parameter. This has to be done if the driver '' detects'' a different scanner than you actually have connected to your system. But for a first test you can as well leave it to mov=0 as in the above example.

More details to all the possible parameters and their possible values as well as a list of all devices supported by the driver and even more information beyond that can be obtained via the command man sane-plustek typed at the command line.


For the new settings to take effect, you have to be logged in again as root and then invoke depmod -a. I do so:

Welcome to SuSE Linux 7.2 (i386) - Kernel 2.4.7 (tty2).

mathplanet login: root
Password:
Last login: Thu Sep 20 16:27:49 on tty2
Have a lot of fun...
mathplanet:~ # depmod -a
mathplanet:~ #

This command will cause depmod to read in the file /etc/modules.conf and process and search all paths mentioned therein and create a matching dependency table. This usually works automatically. There should (hopefully) be no error messages. If you want to see in detail which files were found by depmod, you should use depmod -av instead of the depmod -a in the example above. The list will be crowded, so you probably should use even better the command depmod -av |grep pt_drv instead of depmod -a. This will only print the output lines of depmod that contain the word pt_drv and therefore are of interest to us. At least one such line should appear. On my system, that looks like this:

Welcome to SuSE Linux 7.2 (i386) - Kernel 2.4.7 (tty2).

mathplanet login: root
Password:
Last login: Thu Sep 20 16:51:14 on tty2
Have a lot of fun...
mathplanet:~ # depmod -av |grep pt_drv
/lib/modules/2.4.7/misc/pt_drv.o
mathplanet:~ #