Documentation of Parallel and Serial port configuration?

[Holly Bostick]

Hi again,

Now that all my 'issues' about installing Wine 20050930 are resolved,
I'm running a clean install like a completely new user and taking notes
so I can document what *real* new users might get confused by, and what
they need to do (as such a long-term Wine user myself, there are a lot
of things that used to need to be done that are no longer needed, and
things that now need to be done that didn't need to before) to get the
Wine base system running optimally.

(So far, Wine is doing quite well, btw-- I've only run winecfg and set
up my drives, but the several sub-operations that I know needed to
occur, such as creating the .wine directory, and correctly symlinking
within dosdevices all did occur correctly, which is quite nice).

The thing is, there's a question on wine-users as to how to configure
parallel ports in the absence of the config file. Since I was running
winecfg, I looked, and I don't see any configuration possible for
parallel (or serial, since that might also be needed) ports. I myself
don't use my ports, nor do I use any programs that need to connect to
said ports, so I can't confirm that they would be automatically detected
and configured (although I would imagine/deeply hope that they are, if
the ports are properly set up on the system as a whole).

However, naturally this user is not the only one who's going to want to
know if they have to edit system.reg or something to configure their
ports, and I certainly don't want to guess or assume in the docs.
There's not even any 'status' output in winecfg, saying that there are
parallel ports or serial ports detected and where, so how can a user
verify said ports, and what must they do to change the port
configuration if necessary?

This is probably also a valid question for external MIDI ports, which
are important to the audio community (which seems to need Windows apps
since the native pro sound apps are not yet quite up to par).

Any further information appreciated.

Holly