Introduction
This note describes how to configure the parallel port ZIP drive on a Linux system.
Older parallel port ZIP drives used the ppa kernel module, but more recent versions of the drive (After April 1998) use imm. There are slight differences between using the two modules, which will be noted as they come up.
This was written for Slackware 10.0 and kernel 2.4.26. This should apply to other distros using 2.4.x kernels, but has not been tested on kernel 2.6.x.
Modules
For a newer ZIP drive, simply run modprobe imm as root. Done!
For the older models, you’ll first need to add a couple lines to /etc/modules.conf:
alias parport_lowlevel parport_pc
alias scsi_hostadapter ppa
Then load the module by running modprobe ppa as root.
Mounting/Unmounting
Once the module is installed, ZIP discs can be mounted as standard SCSI devices.
As well as the standard mount/umount/eject commands, Iomega offers a toolset for working with ZIP discs in Linux. This set provides mount/unmount commands, as well as password protection and formatting tools. The set is available from Iomega’s website.