Re: PC parrilel port zip drive?
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
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