Re: More Ports for Debian's
wb2oyc@cyberenet.net says:
>>I've got an intel based Debian box, and an m68k (Atari Falcon), also running
>>Linux. I'd liked to connect them using ppp or plip, but the bigger box has
>>all serial and paralel ports ocupied (mouse, modem, printer). So I decided
>>to purchase a card giving me an additional paralel and two serial ports. This
>>was the only card I could find after looking for a month, it's no-name, w/o
>>any kind of manual (just a jumper-charts regarding the i/o addresses),
>>and the vendor hasn't got an idea.
>>
>Ciccio,
> One thing you might try, is to use one of the new serial ports as
>cua2 (DOS COM3) and disable the fourth one (at least for now). The new
>parallel should be OK as LPT2.
You're right; the new parallel port works OK. The problem is that the
Triton II motherboard, it's bios , plug and pray facilities, or something else, is
changing the I/O and IRQ's everytime I set up something. My Soundblaster
was on IRQ 5, and suddently I had to recompile the kernel because I found it
again in IRQ10. Also, when I uninstalled the new card, I expected to get the
old configuration back; but at the first moment, I couldn't find neither the
mouse nor the modem port. I played a while, cat'ing things to the device, and
using chat and `dip -t', and at a certain moment I got the modem port where
it was. Then I started X, but there was no mouse. I kept playing the same way,
and finally found the mouse too on the original port. I didn't touch any of the
device files, setserial, which eventually could explain to me this behaviour
(because I wouldn't know how to do it).
> I use that very same setup on my machine
>here.
You also have an Atari Falcon connected?
> COM4 is sometimes troublesome because of interference caused by the
>video cards, especially if your I/O cards are a mix of 8 and 16 bit variety.
>The reason is this: the older 8 (and many 16 bit for that matter) only decode
>the lower 12 bits of the I/O address! Ever notice how the doc's will sometimes
>show them as x3e8! That 'x' represents the top 4 bits of the I/O address, that
>for most older cards is "a don't care"! Well, the newer cards DO care! As
>they fully decode the I/O address (all sixteen bits are significant). This mix
>of cards that fully decode the address, and those that don't, create the issue.
>For example; one card may be set at 03e8, and another at 13e8, and guess what?
>The old card will see both addresses as the same! Since it doesn't look at the
>upper four bits, it doesn't have any way of knowing that it is NOT the correct
>address (it thinks it is its own address anyway). In my case, with my COM3, I
>set it to IRQ 5 to avoid conflict with the "shared" IRQ, which is often possible
>when running DOS, but not likely to be successful with any other intelligent
>OS.
The tiny sheet doesn't mention any IRQ's, and IO addresses are specified
with only 3 hex-digits (so, there is no `x' nor `0'). I'm a newcomer to
hardware issues, but I thought, one device in IRQ4 and 0x03F8 shouldn't
conflict with another on IRQ4 and 0x?2F8. I'll try it right now, but anyway,
it would be a pitty to loose the second (forth) serial port. Isn't there a way
to avoid this?
TIA
--
Ciccio C. Simon
ciccio@arrakis.es
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