[rescue] Parallel ports [was Re: Slightly OT: ?Bad Cap Saga]

[John Floren]

On Thu, Aug 21, 2008 at 10:04 AM, Geoffrey S. Mendelson
<gsm at mendelson.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 21, 2008 at 09:49:56AM -0400, John Floren wrote:
>>
>> I think I could probably deal with losing the parallel port (Goodbye,
>> dot-matrix printer) but the worst thing is the way it's getting harder
>> to get real serial ports. As with these parallel ports, the serial
>> hardware is on the motherboard, there's just nowhere to connect a
>> cable. They tell us to use USB to serial converters, but I do a lot of
>> debugging with serial consoles on Plan 9, and USB-serial doesn't work
>> so well there :(
>
> Is it really that much of a problem? USB to parallel converters are sold
> in lots of places and they work fine with printers. (I know, you have the
> one that doesn't).
>
> Serial ports are a different story, but if you are using *NIX as the
> operating system for the terminal emulator, or a Windows terminal program
> instead of Procomm* in a dos box, it should work fine with one of those
> PCI serial port cards.
> Geoff.
>
> * I still use Procomm occasionaly, but most of the time I use minicom, a
> Procomm clone for Linux.
> --
> Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM

PCI serial port cards may be an option. The problem is not running the
terminal emulator on *NIX or Windows, it's outputting to the
(nonexistent) serial device during Plan 9 bootup--if your kernel is
bad, you frequently don't have time to read errors off the screen. A
serial card may be an option... kinda forgot those even existed, the
last one I saw was ISA and it went in my 486 :)

John
-- 
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn