Many people where interested in microcontroller programming after the article whichI wrote in 2002. However this first step to get the development environment up andrunning is the hardest. If something does not work then you have absolutely no cluewhere the fault is. Programmer cable wrong?? Circuit faulty? Installation incorrect?Parallelport disabled in bios? Kernel modules for ppdev compiled wrong? There canbe a lot of reasons why things don't work.