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Have anyone tried using a USB to LPT cable to connect the parallel board to the USB port? It has to be one with a driver for Linux so I can use it with CNC2.

Hi,

Actually, even with an adapter and a Linux driver, it will fail in the end because of the random latency that such device introduces. You need to understand that in the present case, the parallel port is not used as a data bus but is a programmable pulse generator. For the cnc / printer to work, all pulses must be timed and synched accurately.
With usb, the synchronisation and required time accuracy is just impossible to reach. For Linuxcnc to work, you need a good old parallel port soldered on your motherboard or on a fast synchronous bus like PCI.

The CNC scene has been using the $155 smoothstepper device to do this for a while: http://www.warp9td.com/

Some of them are finally starting to switch to the cheaper RAMPS setup though.

I'm using UC100 usb to paralell for my CNC3020 and it works great, so you can run Mach3 on a laptop