[olug] Drive letter assignments

[Kevin D. Snodgrass]

--- On Wed, 4/13/11, Christopher Cashell <topher-olug at zyp.org> wrote:
> Then along came Hot Swap had drives.  And
> PCMCIA.  And USB.  And
> Firewire.  And so on.
> 
> All of a sudden, the hardware in a machine couldn't be
> relied on to
> stay static.  Hardware could be added or removed at
> any time.  A
> couple of different subsystems were attempted to handle
> this until
> udev came along and offered a level of flexibility,
> configurability,
> and capability that could handle modern systems.

Ah, I do remember something called "hotplugd" or something like that several years ago.  

> Oh yeah, and it cleans up all the crap in /dev, so entries
> there are
> actually meaningful and only exist when a device matches it
> (reducing
> confusion and complexity when users try to deal with
> hardware from the
> OS). ;-)

Really?  Then why do I have lp0, lp1, lp2 and lp3 on a machine with no parallel ports?  (OK, it does have 1, but it is disabled in BIOS.  Haven't printed anything via lpX in YEARS.  Do still have an HP LaserJet Series II on the shelf...)

# uname -r
2.6.34.8-68.fc13.i686
# ls -l /dev/lp*
crw-rw----. 1 root lp 6, 0 Apr 13 12:54 /dev/lp0
crw-rw----. 1 root lp 6, 1 Apr 13 12:54 /dev/lp1
crw-rw----. 1 root lp 6, 2 Apr 13 12:54 /dev/lp2
crw-rw----. 1 root lp 6, 3 Apr 13 12:54 /dev/lp3


Kevin D. Snodgrass