Installation problem

I cannot get LinuxCNC to work on my AMD64 bit PC, Please help!!

I have been running LinuxCNC on an old 32bit machine for a few years now and all was well. The 32 bit PC has recently died a death.

My son gave me his old amd64 bit PC. So I downloaded a new copy of the live install DVD/CD from www.linuxcnc.org/linuxcnc-2.7-wheezy.iso. Carried out all instructions as per the information provided and all seemed fine. Good Latency figures, Simulation good even tried one of my old files, no problems.

Connected my CNC machine to the pc parallel port and nothing happens.

I checked out the “Alternate Install Methods” and to honest it lost me totally. I'm a 70 year old who can use a PC and follow the installation instructions within basic limits.

Question One - as my computer can run in simulator mode, should it be able to run a CNC machine?

Question Two - Can you direct me to a simple install procedure of any of the many versions of LinuxCNC?

Thanks in anticipation, Ian

In addition to the above advice.
If your machine has only one parallel port, just set the loadrt hal_parport line in your hal file to loadrt hal_parport cfg="0 out", rather than trying to specify a specific address, let the software find it for you.

if for some reason you'd rather explicitly define the address a simpler terminal window command line for listing the available parallel port addresses would be
cat /proc/ioports | grep parport

If that still doesn't work check to make sure that the parallel port is not disabled in the bios.