Hi list,
A friend gave me an old German laptop:
- Intel 80486
- 20 MB Ram
- Serial and parallel port
- Floppy disk unit (broken)
- Expansion bus slot
- Operative system: Windows 95
- 500MB hard disk
- Norton Commander 5 for DOS installed
He wanted to rescue all the information that he had in the laptop (and may be find a way to still use the laptop), the problem is that the laptop has the floppy disk unit broken and the is no way to access de information.
I use Debian 5 and I have a laplink cable so I decided at the beginning install Dosemu to run Norton Commander v5 (I was very lucky to have found this program that I used when I was a teenager to transfer files between my computers a long time ago) for DOS under GNU/Linux, because with wine didn't
work.
After some attempts I gave up, it was not possible to stablish a communication through the computers using GNU and Windows. I guessed there was a problem with the parallel port hardware access, I enabled the lpt0 hardware access in Dosemu but nothing happened even though the lpt0 device is working in Debian.
I tried with Windows, I found a computer with Windows Vista and it worked, amazing the fact that NC could still run under Windows Vista, although NC have some problems with Windows Vista (I don't blame NC) but at least I could recover the information.
Ok, it worked, but I don't like to use MS products, I spent many hours searching in the Net to find if there are software like NC for GNU, but, I just found Midnight Commander, but unfortunately it does not have parallel port link capability.
I found some Windows based programs that are capable to transfer information through the parallel port like Total Commander, but
none for GNU systems, I couldn't believe that because GNU/Linux claims to be suitable for old computer as for new computers, but not all the old computer have a network card and today the only way to access that computers is through the parallel or serial port.
Could it be possible that there are no software to perform this task under GNU/Linux?
I found an interesting feature in the Debian Installation Guide about to use the parallel port to install Debian, which I think is very good. I didn't try this.
I also found another interesting way to use the parallel port to access to Internet using the Plip driver, I think this can be a good solution to the connectivity between old and new computers:
LINUX PLIP MINI-HOWTO
Andrea Controzzi, controzz@cli.di.unipi.it
v2.1, 12 March 1998
http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-mini/PLIP.html9. A PLIP link between DOS and Linux
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/PLIP-9.htmlQuickly Setting Up PLIP and NFS
June 1st, 1998 by Loris Renggli in
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2573The articles mention that to access to Internet through a GNU/Linux computer the Windows/DOS computer have to use basically two programs:
The Plip driver for DOS
ftp://ftp.crynwr.com/drivers/plip.zip
And
Trumpet WinSock
I think they are very good articles but when I try to implement the Plip solution, I could not make it work, may be I'm not good enough with GNU/Linux networks and also I couldn't find the exactly Trumpet WinSock article's
version.
I think access Internet through the parallel port in theory is a great idea but why the free software community never develop easy to use tools to manage the parallel port connectivity between computers?. Perhaps everybody is able to write a program to do it.
I know that this is a very old issue, but as in my case, sometimes this kind of solutions are needed. In the MS Windows world there are still software that perform this task.
To finish my questions are:
- Is there a way to connect two computers through the parallel port in GNU/Linux?
- Is there a easy way to have Internet connectivity in GNU/Linux using the parallel port?
Think about all that old computers that could be revived!
Thanks in advance,
Juan Navarro.