Question about Laplinking

From Steve Michaelis

Answered By: Robos, Jim Dennis, Thomas Adam

Hey, I recently bought a IBM thinkpad 760L with a 75mhz processor. I want to install LibraNet linux on it, but it has no CD and no Network card. I have libranet on my PC and I love it. I was wondering how (or if) I could use the "Null modem laplink" thing that I have heard about. Any help is appreciated! Thanks, Steve

[Robos] This above sucks! Please send plain text, this is all I need to read...

Hmm, word wrapping at 75 chars would be nice too... Anyway, if I'm not too much mistaken libranet is a modded debian version. Soo, you can either look for boot floppies from libranet or use the debian ones and then somehow update to libranet. OK, you loose the advantage of the libranet installer (which is nice if I read it correctly somewhere) but you have it. For instructions on how to install look through these:

http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/ibm.html

[JimD]

In regards to your laplink question: Linux can use a driver called PLIP to provide IP service over a Laplink(TM) type parallel port cable. You basically just:

 	modprobe plip
	ifconfig plip1 $IPADDR pointopoint $OTHERADDR
	route add default plip1

and you can using any normal TCP/IP protocol over the resulting link, just like it was a PPP link but over a parallel port rather than a serial line.

[Thomas] Jim -- it is well publicised that I run PLIP due to lack of NIC's. While your instructions above are perfectly accurate, they may well not work.

The command "modprobe plip" assumes that certain settings have been set in /etc/modules.conf. In debian the command "update-modules" does a relatively good job of this, but I still find editing the file by way of "vim" a necessity, if not for my own sanity.

The module "plip" replies on "parport" and "parport_pc" (often a module alias) to be loaded. This is usually done anyway if you have a paralell port on your machine.

One thing that plip will require is to know the irq and the io address of your paralell port. Thus, in my /etc/modules.conf I have the line:

alias parport_lowlevel parport_pc
options parport_pc io=0x378,0x278 irq=7,auto

Which assumes that the paralell port uses an IRQ of 7 (typically 7 + 5 are the usual IRQ's). You should also ensure in your BIOS that the paralell port mode is set to something like EPP or Bi-directional.

[JimD]

I know know of a Linux installation floppy that supports this. However, I imagine with enough sweat and work, you could trick a Toms Root/Boot floppy into running it; then mounting NFS off another Linux box, running ldconfig to access a more recently and full features glibc, partition, format and mount your filesystems, and run debootstrap on that.

It would take a Linux expert. I just used debootstrap to install Debian onto my laptop (using LVM, logical volume management). It took about thirty steps

I know know of a Linux installation floppy that supports this. However, I imagine with enough sweat and work, you could trick a Toms Root/Boot floppy into running it; then mounting NFS off another Linux box, running ldconfig to access a more recently and full features glibc, partition, format and mount your filesystems, and run debootstrap on that.

It would take a Linux expert. I just used debootstrap to install Debian onto my laptop (using LVM, logical volume management). It took about thirty steps. (My experience is documented at my Wiki site: http://www.starshine.org/SysadMoin/moin.cgi/DebootstrapInstallation )

Your situation would be even trickier.

However, it's possible you could simply pull out the hard drive, temporarily install it into a desktop system, install Linux there (leaving it mostly unconfigured) and then re-attach the hardrive into the laptop). This is also tricky and requires some expertise. Heather (my wife) is a pro at that technique.

Sorry I can't be more detailed, but this should just give you the basic ideas.

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