Our programmer works out of the box with the bootable CD that comes with it. You can however also use it directly without booting from the CD. It will work with Linux, Windows, BSD unix, etc ... ... basically any OS for which you can get either avrdude (http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/avrdude/) or uisp (http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/uisp) to work.

uisp

Here you need to select the programmer type "dapa".
The command line to program the microcontroller is:

uisp -dlpt=/dev/parport0 --erase  -dprog=dapa

uisp -dlpt=/dev/parport0 --upload if=YourProgramToLoad.hex 
           -dprog=dapa -dno-poll -v=3 --hash=32 --verify

avrdude

To use the programmer hardware with avrdude you edit first the avrdude.conf file and add the following entry:

programmer
  id    = "dapa";
  desc  = "tuxgraphics parallel port programmer";
  type  = par;
  reset = 16;
  sck   = 1;
  mosi  = 2;
  miso  = 11;
;

The command line to program an Atmega8 microcontroller is then:

avrdude -p m8 -c dapa -e -U flash:w:YourProgramToLoad.hex

Don't be shocked by those long command lines. Nobody can remember them. You will generally have them included in a Makefile. In you can just type something like

make load

You can also write a little script which includes the commands. Our "Linux AVR programming kit" contains a script called avrdude_easyflash. In other words you can just run:

avrdude_easyflash YourProgramToLoad.hex

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