Non Parallel port / PCI / ISA options?

I bet this is asked a lot but could not find the answer easily (only searched the first 5 pages of forum posts)

Is there a list of supported non parallel port / PCI/ ISA attached stepper controllers?

Rebuilding a machine (plasma cutter) for a friend and they are dead set on using a laptop to drive it (Already tried to talk them out of it)
The laptop is a decent machine (Intel I5 and can disable all the power saving options in the bios) so from a software side should be no problems. But on the hardware side I have no idea how to get the real time connection out to the steppers and sensors.

The laptop does not have a parallel port so left with
USB, Ethernet, Serial, PCMCIA

As for the rest of the machine will be a simple 3 axis stepper with limit and touch off sensors. Not going to need much for IOs.

Reading the forums it sounds like the 7I80 would be ideal but it sounds like it is not supported directly by linuxCNC then found the 7I43 but the USB configuration is not supported...

So is there any viable options for a step/dir controller that is attached by USB, Ethernet, Serial, PCMCIA under linuxCNC?

I would verify that you can run LinuxCNC on the laptop and that you have decent latency figures before going down that particular road...

USB is easy to rule out as it cannot support real time operations
Serial can be ruled out as its not fast enough (other than exotic high speed cards)

a PCMCIA/Expresscard/whatever parallel port card should work as long as its a true bus interface parallel device (not USB-->parallel),
Beware: most available express cards are USB based

There are some options for Ethernet but none very straight forward yet
The 7I80 (and therefore 7I76E) has beta support but more work is needed
and it will require a Ethernet chipset that is supported by Xenomai/RT-net which may be an issue with the laptop.

Another possibility is to use a remote PC running LinuxCNC with the laptop being the a remote display/controller. There is work on supporting this mode of operation using a Raspberry Pi/Xenomai with a remote web interface (so any web browser can be the HMI)

Ahh forgot about the PCMCIA to PLL cards forgot about those will have to go do some checking on those.

Do you have a link to the Raspberry Pi information? Have a few of them floating around and would work out well in this application (His shop is space limited to stay the least.)

Not offhand, I think it was discussed in the emc-developers list so a google
search with that included may find it for you