On Wed, 20 Feb 2002, John Alvord wrote:
> On Wed, 20 Feb 2002 10:39:36 -0500 (EST), Bill Davidsen
> <davidsen@tmr.com> wrote:
> >There was a protocol called PLIP which did just what you want. I've used
> >it many times for laptop install (Patrick even fixed it in Slackware at my
> >request).
> >
> >Unfortunately, while the feature is still in recent 2.[45] kernels, it
> >appears to be broken. The last laptop I installed needed a network card to
> >get working.
> This was interesting when NIC (network interface cards) cost $100.
> Nowadays, they are a lot less costly and interest in the PLIP solution
> has evaporated.
Unless cards now come with their own slot, this is still very useful. A
system without parallel is very unusual, while one without network is far
more common, and one without a place to even add a network is not that
hard to find. While a home user with only a few systems which he can
configure at will has no trouble adding a NIC, business use in many places
doesn't work that way, and honestly I have a hard time telling someone to
buy NICs, cables, a hub, etc, when a $7 cable will work between systems
with a functional PL/IP kernel.
Considering the low use things supported in the kernel, I see no reason to
think PL/IP is less so. Not a lot of TokenRing out there these days, even
in an IBM shop;-)
-- bill davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com> CTO, TMR Associates, Inc Doing interesting things with little computers since 1979.- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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