Parallel Port on a VM and testing

Hello,

TL;DR; I installed LinuxCNC in a VirtualMachine (virtualbox) and I need to demonstrate that LinuxCNC is capable of writing any output to the parallel port. Is this possible from a VM?. Thank you very much indeed.
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(Quick introduction about myself) I'm a student in an Argentinean university and I've never used CNC before. However I have 20 years of experience in software development (mostly backend C/C++/Perl/Ruby) and I've worked in low level software development in linux.

Having said this, I have to say that I downloaded a Debian net install and downloaded and compiled LinuxCNC from sources. It was not a very hard thing, but it took some time to satisfy all the dependencies required.

Problem
We still don't have a real computer to install this, so I created this all inside a VirtualBox VM, which let me run LinuxCNC without issues. My professor asked me if I am able to prove that LInuxCNC can write in a parallel port and I don't know if that's able from a VirtualMachine?

Thank you very much indeed.

Kind regards.

Felix

Oh, This is awesome. I'll give a try and go back to you.

Thank you very much!

Best regards.

If I remember right there is a way to write pp output into a file(VMware). But never used it

Ah, perhaps. VMWare seems to be a better virtualization software, but I am using Virtualbox because I had it already installed for my job (I don't remember if there's a free version of VMware).

However this is exactly what I was looking for , the problem now is that I am facing my own "ignorance on LinuxCNC".

While testing this I realized that I need to know a lot more about HAL. I started with the introduction, but it seems that I have to read a lot more, specially because some of the concepts go too fast for me.

Tomorrow I will search in the forums looking for more information about HAL, besides the links :

linuxcnc.org/docs/html/hal/intro.html
linuxcnc.org/docs/html/hal/tutorial.html#_examining_the_hal
and probably all in here:
linuxcnc.org/docs/html/hal/

But I need some extra help for concepts because HAL seems to be complex for a total CNC newbie like me

Thanks again for your help.