Linux/Computers and ETC Lighting System

[beastrace91]

I work in a small theater, just under 400 seats, and we currently have a decently old (but still usable) 96 channel ETC Lighting console. It works fine and well but while piddling around in the theater today I was thinking, is there a method out there that would allow me to hook control of the dimmers into my laptop or some other computer system? Board is connected via 2 DMX cables, how ever I also have a CAT5 port (who knows what it does or if it works) on the same panel that the lighting system hooks into. Anyone have any experience every trying to set something like this up and might want to point me in the right direction? I used a program called "ETC Offline" for awhile to program light plots at home while away from work but I would like to control the stage lighting plot in real time from my laptop, if possible.

Just a fun idea I was throwing around... going to continue crawling google to see if it shows up anything on the matter but a few quick searches didn't yield much useful so I figured posting here couldn't hurt :)

Thanks,
~Jeff

[davideotape]

Don't know if this'll help but there's a guide to building a USB to DMX interface here: http://www.usbdmx.com/usb_dmx_interface.html ;)