Most electronics gives off RFI (radio freqency interference). Ferrite
cores on cables and a faraday cage around the whole computer can cut
down on this, but on most laptops, all there is is plastic perhaps with
a thin metalic coating. The electroluminescent backlight is also
probably running at a hundred or so volts or so which causes even more
RFI than the lower voltage components found in most electronics.
Talk to a real EE to be sure :).
I'm not sure what you mean about no serial ports around or trashing a
serial port. There are a couple ways to do use unix printers from an
MS-DOS machine. You can redirect lpt1: to com1: port with the mode
program. See the MS-DOS manual for specifics which vary depending on
MS-DOS version.
Once you do this, you can login to your unix account, then do something
like "cat - | lpr" or whatever your stdio printer spooler program is on
your unix machine then quit from your terminal program. Now everything
sent to the redirected printer will go out your serial port, then be
read by lpr then printed out. To stop this, just run your terminal
program again and hit control-D. You may have to configure your
terminal program to not hang up the modem when you quit from it or send
initialization strings when you start it up. You can get a bit more
sophisticated and set up multiple lpr jobs, retrieval of queue
information, and other features. It shouldn't be hard to do it with
just shell scripts or perhaps perl.
Another way would be to get an ethernet adapter for your Ultralite
and arrange something on campus. Some universities are setting up
ethernet connections in dorms and public areas on campus for use
by students and faculty.
-- <-:(= Anthony Stieber anthony@csd4.csd.uwm.edu uwm!uwmcsd4!anthony