I have EMC2 2.4.4 running on Ubuntu 10.04 "Lucid Lynx" LT installed from the live CD.
Occasionally after stopping and re-starting EMC I get a failure to launch with a paraport unavailable error. Even more occasionally it will clear after a few minutes, most of the time I have to re-start the PC.
I have not been able to find anything to cause this or to prevent this. Didn't have this on the old system but it was an earlier EMC version on a different PC.
I am unsure of the actual age but the PC is a HP Compaq 2.8 GHz c\ 1GB Ram. The parallel port is on the motherboard. I have several PCI card parallel ports I was thinking of trying but have not installed them yet.
Have you checked the BIOS to make sure the parallel port is set to EPP? If that doesn't fix it, it sounds like a flaky parallel port. If that's the case, you might want to consider getting a parallel port peripheral card.
I finally got the machine connected to the outside world and let it download all of the updates and I have not seen the problem again. It is still using the parallel port on the motherboard.
I had no idea that there would be so many updates. Most of them were probably not needed. Like all the language packs for everything. But it did update EMC and the Ubuntu kernel and added a pile of proper hardware drivers. Even the old Motorola WiFi card came to life and connected.
Don't install the closed source graphics card driver... It may not play nice with realtime. keep whatever one the live cd installs by default. (for future reference)