Hi all, On 2 May, this message from Mike Fedyk echoed through cyberspace: > On Wed, May 02, 2001 at 08:22:59PM -0300, Peter Cordes wrote: >> On Tue, May 01, 2001 at 08:23:33PM -0800, Ethan Benson wrote: >> > On Tue, May 01, 2001 at 07:51:49PM -0700, Andrew Sharp wrote: >> > > I haven't seen too many [OK, none] oldworld's with a parallel port. >> > > Perhaps some of the more esoteric/non-apple models have such a >> > > thing. I suppose you could go out and buy a PCI parallel port I/O >> > > card that might work.... >> > >> > no Macintosh has a paralel port. i have however seen third party >> > paralel port cards that can be put in NuBus macs. don't know about >> > PCI. >> >> PCI I/O cards are pretty common. One brand I remember seeing is Lava. >> They definitely have parallel adapters. I'm 99% sure the pport cards >> were available for PCI. MacOS probably wouldn't want to have anything to do >> with them, as usual, but this shouldn't stop Linux from using them. >> > You wouldn't happen to know if they'll work under PPC with the endian > change, I'd immagine that driver writers wouldn't expect non-x86 computers > to use the card...
Be carefull with legacy PC interfaces on PPC hardware. One problem that has been mentioned is endian-cleaness, but that one can be fixed relatively easily by looking at the code. The other probably more tricky problem is that the legacy interfaces will most certainly use IO ports for access to their registers, and the standard Linux drivers for these ports probing only some hardcoded IO addresses. Access to PCI IO space on PPC is tricky, since there are no dedicated IO access commands on the CPU; the IO range is simply a memory-mapped range, accessed like any other memory. Making this fact work together with hardcoded ISA-style IO port addresses in drivers is non-trivial. If at all possible, lend a card from a friend and try it before bying it. Or be prepared to hack the drivers yourself ;-). I think I have read about the serial drivers supporting PCI serial cards, but I'm not so sure about PCI parallel cards. Or do what I did: use an old 486 (possibly with ISA expansion cards) as your home office server, providing print, file, web, etc... services. Cheers Michel ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Michel Lanners | " Read Philosophy. Study Art. 23, Rue Paul Henkes | Ask Questions. Make Mistakes. L-1710 Luxembourg | email [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.cpu.lu/~mlan | Learn Always. "
