Unofficial patches to add PLiP to NetBSD
What is PLiP
If you have an old laptop/notebook without PCMCIA slot
(pccard, or cardbus) and do not want to
rely on a slow serial line for network connectivity, PLiP (parallel IP,
a game on SLIP, the Serial Line IP Protocol), also know as the Crynwr
protocol, is a valid alternative for you.
It is no replacement for a real network card, as it is
- still slow
- extremely CPU consuming (on both client and server)
You will need a special cable (sometimes called a LapLink cable).
The Implementation
The PLiP patches are for architectures using ISA-style lpt devices
only, sorry.
NetBSD includes PLiP support for the pc532 architecture.
The latest version is for NetBSD 1.6.x,
it should work with maybe minor tweaking on -current.
Two older versions are available too:
NetBSD 1.3, which will very likely
apply cleanly on NetBSD 1.4 too, and one for
NetBSD 1.5.3.
Note that the older versions only support the i386 architecture.
Please read the manual page (also included in
the downloads).
For installation you need the approriate sys source tree, cd there
and invoke
patch < plip.patch
Then add options PLIP to your kernel config file and make sure that your
"lpt* at isa?" config entry has an IRQ assigned, like in this example:
# ISA parallel printer interfaces
options PLIP
lpt0 at isa? port 0x378 irq 7 # standard PC parallel ports