Very Computer

Hello:
can anyone tell me (or point me in the right direction) whether a
paraller port
connection for the HP CD-Writer has a workable solution. I am running
mainly
RH 5.2 with 2.2.1 kernel on Inspiron 7IK (Dell's laptop).
Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance.
John.

John,

Yes, it works well.  I am running RedHat 5.2 with the 2.2.1 kernel on an
HP Vectra.  I have an HP7110e CD-Writer connected to the parallel port.
To configure the kernel to be able to use the writer, I enabled
"Parallel Port IDE Device Support," and also enabled "ATAPI generic
devices" and the "epat" protocol.  When your machine boots up after
configuring the kernel this way, it should detect your drive.  

To burn CDs, use the mkisofs program to create an iso9660 image of your
data, and then use cdrecord to burn the image to disk:

% mkisofs -a -r -J -o /path/to/output/image /path/to/data

% cdrecord dev=1,0,0 speed=2 -v -eject /path/to/output/image

For further information, check out
http://www.torque.net/parport/paride.html.

- Dave