No movement, stepconf and MX4660

Hello all, 

my goal is get my stepper motors to respond to movement commands.

Long time Machinist here, I am ok at computer science, but only self trained. I am new to linuxcnc, but not to Cnc I Have aquired a Gryphon gantry router with Leadshine MX4660. I have an older pc with 5v parallel port. I used stepconf to configure my control. I have downloaded and installed linuxcnc in october 2025, yet.with everything plugged in and up and running, my steppers are locked solid, and when i command a move, the control registers movement, but the machine remains stationary.

I have the bios set to EPP and the address is shows for the parallel port is 378h. the charge pump on the MX4660 is set to Off ( which I have read that counterintuitively means on the MX4660 that it is set to look for the 10khz signal ).I set the set/dir pins to the MX4660 manual using pin 2-9 as step/dir for x,y,z,tandem x. I have  tried a few configs with enable on pin 1, charge pump on pin 16, parport 0, parport 0x378, parport 378h, parport 0x378h, parport 378h. I have tried swapping the step/dir pins. i have not confirmed if my parallel port cable is good, I may test that here in a bit.

Seems like the control isn't communicating with the drivers. i am not sure how my hal file is configured for the parport settng.  I plan on posting my .ini and .hal files soon, next time I go out to the shop I will grab a copy of each.

I am just curious if there's something simple I have over looked, or even unaware of, and if anyone has any insight on this.

Thank you in advance if you have the time to help out.

Did you confirm the parport address is 0x378?

If not, post the output of
sudo lspci -v

    thank you for the response, i have an older Dell 980 optiplex with onboard parallel port. the output of lspci shows no parallel port controller and under communications controller is has no i/o ports line in between "flags" and "memory at".
in bios its set to epp and address 378h.
i ran the command cat /proc/ioports grep parports and it showed 0000-0000 : parport0 (twice, one above the next)
so i ran the command sudo cat /proc/ioports grep parports and after enter my password it showed 0378-37a : parport0 and 037b-037f : parport0.
i tested every pin of my parallel cable and its good. im not sure if i need to do something with enable amplifier on pin 1 because i tried it unused, enabled, and enabled active low and i still got no movement. i read somewhere that the kernel may not be reading my parallel port but i am not that savy at this, its been a week or two since i started dabbling in this..
i will attach my .ini and .hal files

Mekanoid wrote:

output of lspci shows no parallel port controller

 

Not sure what to make of that. I was under the impression the motherboard parallel port and any PCI parallel ports always list in lspci. Maybe someone else can confirm this. My suspicion would be the controller I.C. for the parallel port is dead...

edit:
just learned onboard parallel ports don't always list in lspci

Do you have a parport in /dev?
I would also check output of sudo dmesg

My next step would be to check the parport voltage outputs with a multimeter or oscilloscope to verify the voltages on the pins change as expected when commanded in LinuxCNC. I would do this with the parallel cable disconnected from the cnc machine.