Galep IV

Here is what I did to get the Galep IV flash burner working in Linux. Questions and comments to Stefan Reinauer.

What is it?

• http://www.conitec.com/english/galep4.htm

Parallel Port

My laptop has no more parallel port, so I got myself an ExSys EX-1365 1P Parallel PCMCIA 32bit card for 69€. Conitec suggests buying a twice as expensive card, but the ExSys does SPP/EPP/ECP and it works fine.

Since the ExSys card comes with a short cable already, I used a gender changer instead of the cable that came with the Galep IV. This makes up for a nice free table.

The parport and parport module got loaded automatically, but I had to load the ppdev module manually after inserting the card.

There USB to Parallel converters based on the USS720 chips have a linux driver that implements a parport0 device as well. Maybe such a converter can be used as a cheaper alternative. But if you ever happen to try using the GalepIV in Windows, too, you better get a PCMCIA card, as the Galep32 software does not exactly have smart device handling.

Distribution

I have been using an OpenSUSE 10.2 distribution, fairly default installation. Since it did not work in the first place, I got an update RPM for wine 0.9.32, but I think that is not required.

Wine

Ok, obviously you need to run this as root, or be able to write to /dev/parport0

• get the latest software from http://www.conitec.com/english/software.htm. At the time of this writing, the latest version is 1.17.50.
• Now start the installation program:

$ wine G32setup_11750.exe

This should work without further trouble.

• Now start winecfg, go to the Applications tab and choose "Add application..."
• Choose "Program Files", then "GALEP32", then "Galep32.exe"
• Select "Windows 98" in the "Windows Version" selector below.
• Change to the "Libraries" tab.
• In the "New override for library:" field, select "msvcrt", then click "Add"
• Press Ok
• Open ~/.wine/user.reg in your favourite editor and add the following lines to the end of the file:

[Software\\Wine\\VDM\\ppdev]
"378"="/dev/parport0"

• Enter

$ rm -f .wine/dosdevices/lpt1
$ ln -s /dev/parport0 .wine/dosdevices/lpt1

That's it, when you start the application now, it should work fine and detect the GalepIV.

$ wine .wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/GALEP32/Galep32.exe

Convenience

I am using KDE, so I wanted to add an icon to my Desktop. The same is for sure possible with Gnome.

• right click on the desktop, choose "Create New", choose "Link to Application"
• choose a name (ie. GalepIV) and an icon.
• Go to the "Application" tab
• Add "Galep IV software" as Description
• Add the following line as Command

kdesu wine "/root/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/GALEP32/Galep32.exe"

• Add your homedirectory (or whatever) as working path
• Press Ok