Hey guys, this forum is a little irregular so I hope this does what it is supposed to.\
I figured out how to solve either this problem or a very similar one. I am using a card which uses the ASIX9100 chipset, apparently very similar to the mcs9100 one, which was reported to work well.
Using an old liveusb for linuxcnc 2.7, this parallel port card did not have this problem. It was also not detected and I never got it working. Linuxcnc 2.7 wouldn't install from a liveusb anyway so I tried 2.8. Finally got it all installed (problems with uefi and grub and partitioning and stuff). Had to install ubuntu to get grub installed, so now I have dual boot, suits me.
If I run sudo lspci -vv it indicates the asix device on the pci bus there, which is progress. However it says after the memory addresses that it is disabled, as described above.
this forum thread showed the way:
bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=231821
my quotes are broken on this keyboard, it says @I found that I could enable it by setting /sys/bus/pci/devices/0000:03:00.0/enable to 1.@
There is a file at the path he specified, simply named enable.
You just type sudo geany at the terminal to open the text editor Geany with priviledge to modify the relevant file. There is just a zero in the file.
Change it to a one, save it and re-run lspci as above.
It shows the thing is enabled.
The next step is to actually interface to the parallel port using linuxcnc. After sorting through tons of misinformation on the subject, I discovered all you have to do is open the my_mill.hal file after running stepconf, and put one of the addresses provided by lspci for the io thing into the line for the parport driver.
This is mostly explained in this document :
linuxcnc.org/docs/html/hal/parallel-port.html
For me the address was 0xe010. So the line was modified from
Code:
loadrt hal_parport cfg="0 out"
to
Code:
loadrt hal_parport cfg="0xe010 out"
It gives an error upon loading linuxcnc saying there is no parallel port registered at that address, but it still works. I just put an oscilloscope on the parallel port to check it. Make sure you get the pinout of the paralle port right, it may be the mirror image of what you think it is, because the pinout is usually stated as the male connector, but you are probably looking at the end of the cable, which is female. That threw me for a loop a bit and made me think it wasn't working for a bit.