Please recommend PCI-E Parallel Port card

in at least as i was willing to try it, yes. it homes and jogs, but that is as far as i was willing to push it.

lspci shows that the card is detected an gives the address as e000/e010 but dmsg shows no parport listed. when i use the address e010, i get the error that parport not found, yet machine works. if i use address 0, i get nothing but error.

i built the machine and installed from live cd and updated to the master branch before i realized that the board was pcie only, so i checked for compatible cards and ordered the syba. day before yesterday, on a whim, i did fresh installation with the card already installed just to make sure that possibly something wasnt missed during install process. no joy. so now i have a startech that came in yesterday that i am going to try.

for the record, i cant wait until 2.8 is official because joints/axis is absolutely BRILLIANT (although there is a *SERIOUS* bug/logic error in gantry movement prior to homing that will rip a machine apart that i need to report but this isnt the thread). I just really wish that you would move away from debian as your primary distro and make linuxcnc more distro agnostic. of all the distros out there, debian? i would vote for arch/lbuntu with openbox for a dedicated machine. light, fast, no frills

Can you post your hal file? is it possible you are loading some other driver in addition to hal_parport?

If hal_parport works with the card, it should not complain (and if it does, I think thats a bug)

(the 0,1,2 address shortcut will only work if Linux detects the card but this should not matter to hal_parport if the actual parallel port base address is provided)

oddwick wrote: I just really wish that you would move away from debian as your primary distro and make linuxcnc more distro agnostic. of all the distros out there, debian? i would vote for arch/lbuntu with openbox for a dedicated machine.

We settled on Debian because the others have too many conditions on the redistribution of custom installers. We used to use Ubuntu until this problem came up.

Plus if you are technically knowledgeable enough to care about distributions its not that difficult to install LinuxCNC on your distribution of choice.

i guess not knowing the internals of linuxcnc, aside from the rt kernal, what else is distro specific? if i had more time, i would try and set mine up more like kiosk mode or possibly build off of slim or server setup with x. i may still try with my old box, but i really cant do anything with it until i get this new one up and running...

PCW wrote: Can you post your hal file? is it possible you are loading some other driver in addition to hal_parport?

If hal_parport works with the card, it should not complain (and if it does, I think thats a bug)

(the 0,1,2 address shortcut will only work if Linux detects the card but this should not matter to hal_parport if the actual parallel port base address is provided)

here is my hal file. this is copied directly from my working box, with the address appended. i dont think the problem is actually in linuxcnc, but in the os itself. it is really weird lspci shows that it is there, but dmsg shows nothing of it being recognized as a parport.

basically, if i give it the address directly, i get an error message on startup that parport not found at [some number which is not the address], but machine responds. if i use the shortcut, then i get similar error, but nothing else...