Thanks to all who had suggestions. I should have been a bit more precise in my original post.
The parallel port dongle is not for copy-protecting the software, it's for ensuring the devices that the software is designed to configure aren't tampered with by unauthorised persons.
I have been running dosemu as root. There are no hardware problems, as I'm dual-booting, and the software works fine under win98.
Subsequent investigation uncovered a feature for detecting a parallel port dongle in the software I'm trying to run, and it does detect the dongle under dosemu, but still no communication. So the problem does seem to be, as one clever chap suggested, with the serial port.
At this point, I'm again stuck. The PC is an IBM 300PL, and doesn't seem to have anything particularly unusual about it. The IRQ and IO settings for the serial ports can be configured in the bios, and are on the standard settings. It is a plug-and-play bios, but the "Plug and Play OS" parameter is set to "no".
setserial /dev/ttyS0 returns the expected result; no error messages.
I tried configuring dosemu for low-level hardware access to the serial port, as recommended for the parallel port, with no joy. I've not seen any mention on Google of people having to do this with the serial port, but no harm in trying.
I had an (unused) internal modem in the PC, which I ripped out in case it was causing a conflict, but no improvement.
I have to admit to being nearly completely ignorant of how serial ports work. Anybody have any clue what may be going wrong, or how to isolate the problem?
Hi Matthew,
I suppose you have the speed / parity / data bits / stop bit settings to match what's on the other end of the serial cable?
Maybe you could find a null-modem cable and connect it between your serial ports, then run a DOS comms program in DOSEmu and
minicom on Linux.
Felix
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