PCIe parallel port adapter MSC 9901 not working (disabled)

DocStein99 wrote:

I just got a PCI-e system, and bought a PCI-e parallel port card. Spent entire day/night figuring it out and it won't work. Chip labeled "W382L" on it. Shows up as a SERIAL PORT. Card actually has a parallel port. It's a serial port card, they expect you to use a driver to convert it to parallel output, like you would if you had an external usb-to-parallel converter cable (that also won't work with Linuxcnc).

The W382L is a combo chip, that does both serial and parallel port, and is usually used for cards that have both. Google searches on the subject seem to imply that serial part usually works fine, the problems are with the parallel port part. And it seems to be mother board bios issues (or settings) and/or a kernel driver problem (or a combination of the two) that prevent the parallel port from working.

What motherboard and what Linux versions did you try the card on? It might work fine in a different system. You could try booting from some different live CDs for other Linux distros and see if you get different (better) results from lspci -v. If you find something that works report the results, maybe a simple kernel patch could fix it with the Linuxcnc distro.

It's a mini atx core i5 Dell Optiplex 790, I have to check the exact motherboard. I ran the newest stable release of Linuxcnc, Wheezy in Debian (which I don't like, btw). For whatever reason, I think it installed as a 32 bit operating system with my 64 bit x86 Intel system. I tried for a bit to try and figure out to load a 64 bit system, and found it was too time consuming reading all the technicalities about the real time modules needing certain drivers that were only designed to work under certain conditions, and figured I would save myself a bunch of work by using the known stable release install.

My replacement PCI-e card arrived today, and I tested working perfect with my setup. Is a new install of the Debian Wheezy.

Startech PCI Express Parallel Port Adapter Card PEX1P

This is the first card I bought, which does not work on my system and shows up as a SERIAL interface (W382L chip):

Moschip 9901 Support 64bit

I wonder if 64 bit has something to do with it? I have Intel x86 (core i5), is a 64 bit system. The last latest easy-install release (I think) installed as 32 bit. I tried for a few hours to figure out how to load a 64 bit system on Intel, and gave up with the distraction.