Parallel port scanner

[Mark Myers]

Rusty Carruth wrote:

> >
> > A couple of years ago a friend of mine bought me a Mustek parallel port
> > scanner.
>
> Some friend!  ;-)  Locking you into windows!  Boo! ;-)
>
> ...
> > When I scanned a picture, straight lines were pixilated & weird. Overall
> > quality was poor.
> ...
> > Anybody know why running a VMWare Win98 and scanning would produce somewhat
> > corrupted results rather than running it in native mode?
>
> Probably your scanner is dumber than I'd have expected and uses the parallel
> port for timing as well as data return!  If the scanner has critical timing
> requirements that cannot be met by vmware you can get funky results.
>
> BTW - how fast is your machine?  How much memory?
>

I have an AMD K6-2 300MHz with 256MB RAM.
One of the things that I have found that I can ONLY do in Linux is burn CD-Rs.
My Acer CDRW drive only has 512Kb memory (cdrecord reports only 384Kb). Those
wonderful programers who came up with cdrecord had the forsight enough to give
it 4MB memory buffer. That is the only thing that saves me when burning CD-Rs
with Linux. Using either Adaptec Easy CD Creator or Nero's Burning ROM under and
Windows OS produces buffer underrun errors, even at single speed.
The Acer I use at work has 8MB memory buffer and works fine under both NT and
now Win2K Pro.
If I were to fault people, I would first fault the CDRW manufacturers, then the
application programmers, and then finally the OS.
I know I would like to redo my system and put in SCSI drives, scanner and zip
drive, but the money isn't there. My wife's birthday was yesterday. I offered to
buy her a new computer because her 486 died. Instead she wanted a La-Z-Boy
chair.
So now I'm $1,100 poorer but have a happy wife. So for now a new machine is on
the back burner.
Just a quickie question:
I have a Pentium 133 laying around that I could use. If I were to put the burner
in it and just run Linux in console mode rather than in X, would it be able to
burn CD-Rs?
Thanks!
Mark