I’m pretty sure “Ubuntu” is Swahili for “Molasses on a cold winters day”
Are you trying to run it on a low power machine?
When one is using a parallel port, one is almost required to be on a older machine. But yes, a P3 450Mhz with 384meg of ram… The thing is that it runs faster off of the CD rom. 10.04 would run at all, 8.04 would boot from the CD n run fine, but would not install. 6.04 would install, but for instance, a reboot takes well over 20 minutes…
But I do have a newer setup with a LPT header ( AMD Phenom II 965) that’s is my HTPC. It runs 10.04 great with a good low latency ( Stayed at 2.4kns jitter for most of the time, but shot up to about 4k after a long while). But it won’t be doing any CNC work anytime soon…
But it dose give me hope for a few of the motherboards I’ve found on newegg with parallel ports. That will go nicely with my old HTPC cpu (AMD Athlon II 260)…
From what I recall of the LinuxCNC mailing list there is an Intel motherboard that some of the guys use that is a small form factor with a parallel port. Something like D525, maybe.
A lot of them I think use the Atom MB. But I can get a Asus of the same family as my HTPC for around $44 with shipping. And I have that AMD cpu already so. I’ll be much faster than the atom and a whole lot cheaper. And the latency’s will be very close… If not better…