How very annoying! RedHat 8 parallel port KVM :-(

[sweh]

My not-a-server (file server, virtual-server host) has a parallel port on it. This turned out to be convenient because I was able to run XP in a VM and pass through the parallel port into the VM. This was enough to let the Willem software work, talk to my EPROM programmer. And thus I could burn EPROMs. Yay!

However this week I decided to upgrade the base operating system from CentOS 6 (which totally stopped receiving any patches in 2020 so likely had security vulnerabilities 'cos RedHat EOL'd their upstream code). I skipped CentOS 7 and jumped to Rocky 8 ('cos CentOS 8 was broken by RedHat). It mostly went well. Except the virtual server code no longer allows for Parallel port pass-through. It seems RedHat removed that functionality.

So now I'm looking to see if I can use the Willem programmer from Linux. I found "geepro", but that seems to support older models of the hardware, and not the 5.0 board I have.

I think I still have an old Pentium 4 desktop, somewhere, that has a parallel port on it. I guess I could try resurrecting that with Windows XP (assuming I can burn a DVD, any more!) but that would be a real PITA to use for the one day a year I need it (get out the PC, keyboard/mouse/power cable, relocate a monitor, etc etc etc).

Maybe I should get a TL866 based programmer; there appears to be Linux software ( https://gitlab.com/DavidGriffith/minipro/ ) for that!