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