Thanks to those who offered suggests and encouragement, especially Kustas, whose pointer to an old email on another newsgroup gave the clue to getting the Zip100 going. How things fall over and died... 1) Trying to do an upgrade with YaST2 and having it hang at the ninth installation step. Struggling to regain control and getting the installation to finish. In 7.0 and 6.4 I had tried to use YaST2 on my machine and found it not able to do the job, even though at work I installed SUSE 6.4 with YaST2 and my fingers crossed. The box at work is newer than my home box and everything went beautifully. That's why, when 7.1 came out I figured that the soup had simmered long enough. Apparently not so for my machine. 2) Discoverying that SaX2 won't work well with a ps/2 mouse using gpm to get cut&paste. The mouse loses control. 3) Discoverying that SaX2, even after being poiinted to my video card and monitor, still can't install a stable Xserver with the XFree86 4.0 stuff. At least on my box. 4) Discoverying that YaST2 installed a 2.2.18 kernel and modules but a 2.4 source with no modules. 5) Discoverying that the standard kernel, have Iomega Zip100, scsi and ppa modules already compiled in, but they don't work. That is, unlike several of the kernels in previous releases, insmod ppa insmod lp didn't work. It gave numerous 'undefined xxxx' errors for both. ********************* Rising from the ashes ********************* The body was officially declared dead. It was time to trot out the first string offense - YaST1, 6) Using YaST1 I reformatted all my drives and installed 7.1 fresh. I used SaX instead of SaX2 to create my Xserver. Worked beautifully the first time, including gpm on my ps/2 mouse. 7) I noticed that the 2.2.18 kernel and modules were again "backed up" by the 2.4 source tree. Bad sign. 8) insmod ppa again failed with the same "undefined...." messages. 9) insmod lp wouldn't work if ppa didn't fire and load paraport. 10) several kernel recompiles, testing variations of switches, "demod -a", and rereading the zip mini-howto like a lawyer looking for a loop hole........ i.e. lost a couple of days... Thought about trying Campbell's ppa-1.4.2 driver but decided it would be a bad day if I couldn't install SuSE with just SuSE. 11) email from Kustas about an newsgroup diiscussion.... a clue! Revert to using parport_pc. I tried serveral combinations starting with parport_pc, which appeared to load ok, but I couldn't print and the zip drive, although it loaded, wouldn't read disks. Oh, I invoked the printer daemon by hand when I notice that it didn't load when parport_pc was fired. This led to an interesting problem where I could send test pages off to the "printer" but they wouldn't print, obviously. I used the printer manager to delete them. Then I tried to "rmmod lp" to remove it. "device is busy"... Reboot. 12) 7.1 seems to have reverted away from envoking paraport by ppa and returned to the old method of having paraport set things up so that parport_pc and ppa would run properly. Then the command "insmod lp" started working. 13) In modules.conf having: alias parport_lowlevel parport_pc options parport_pc io=0x378,0x278 irq=none,none didn't seem to help. Here is what worked: a) do the kernel setup exactly as the Zip=mini howto suggests. b) But, instead of the insmod sequence above do the following: insmod parport insmod parport_pc io=0x278 irq=5 insmod ppa insmod lp /opt/oss/soundon Now the above steps are theoretical, but since they worked when I entered them in that sequence manually, they should work during booting. Forcing the irq to 5 was important. I had to tell it to use lp1 and irq 5, unlike 7.0 and 6.4, which could figure it out without needing to be told. Note: Since alsa has never been able to work on my Yamaha sound chips I've always used OSS from 4Front technologies. I noticed at their website they now offer a single driver that works for both the 2.2.x and the 2.4.x kernels. And it has a fancy graphical install screen too. However, it didn't work (wouldn't recognize my license file) but when I fired 'soundconf' manually I got the old console screen and the install was flawless. Sound's familiar. Moral of my woes? A lesson I learned while getting my pilot's license. NEVER take off without going through the checklist. Translation: Things would have been a lot easier for me if I had read the manual about installation changes before I attempted to install. "There are old pilots. There are bold pilots. There are NO old, bold pilots" JLK