I managed to get much working including that zip drive. Turns out the parallel port needed to have the cable attached more gently than was done earlier. I cannot get my cd burner running yet, that's an HL-DT-ST internal drive with a top speed of 40x. The other thing I can't get working yet is the ensonicq 5880 sound card. I tried installing alsa from debian and I did a successful modprobe on es1371 but alsa doesn't find drivers it needs in the snd- type class and alsa finds no sound device even with discover installed and running. Whatever is broken for the sound card may be a very low level break. I have debian-reference installed and am going to start some reading in that document it looks pretty extensive so far. I had the cd burner running on other systems at /dev/hdd when reading files with it.
