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20041220 Monday December 20, 2004

 Firewire peripherals under JDS - Working!

I don't know how many others out there have had problems with this, but a quick scan of the 'net seems to indicate that support for Firewire devices is a bit tricky with Linux in general.

After an afternoon of mucking about with my laptop, I finally figured out how to get the CD on my laptop to work and it might be useful to others.

My laptop is Dell X200, which has its floppy and CD on a 'media-slice' (docking station) underneath the laptop. The interface between the CD and the laptop is firewire and whilst the CD was detected on boot and could install JDS ok, the CD wasn't recognised after booting.

The trick is that, in JDS (or Suse 8 if you like), not all the firewire support is enabled in the kernel supplied with JDS. So firstly I tried building all of the firewire support into the kernel. Result - no joy.

A bit more homework revealed that the modules that support firewire ieee1394.o, ohci1394.o and sbp2.o, whilst they can be built into the kernel, only work as modules. So you have to configure your kernel to use them as modules.

Did that, still not joy.

Checked the output of 'lsmod' (List modules), A-Ha! They haven't automatically loaded.

Tried loading the modules manually with 'insmod', still no joy!

The second trick is to use modprobe and get it to load raw1394.o and ohci1394.o thusly...

# cd /lib/modules//kernel/drivers/ieee1394
# modprobe raw1394 # modprobe ohci1394

The third and final trick is to realise that loading of ohci1394 will not work unless there is some media in the drive. Stick in a CD and it works ok.

Now have a look at /var/log/messages as this should show that your firewire device has been picked up...

# tail /var/log/messages

Then you can check that the scsi interface is now seeing your firewire device...

# cat /proc/scsi/scsi

If the device is showing up there now you can mount it and get on with your life, in my case...

# mount /dev/cdrom

Yay! Atlast!

Cheers,

Drew.

( Dec 20 2004, 09:25:19 PM GMT / Dec 20 2004, 05:52:03 PM GMT ) Permalink
Trackback: http://blogs.sun.com/Drew/entry/firewire_peripherals_under_jds_working

 Linux kernels!

Well, I had to bite the bullet today and reconfigure a Linux kernel for the first time. My laptop CD drive is an oddly complicated firewire device and isn't picked up by default in JDS.

I'm still not convinced this is for the faint hearted, but I did find a jolly handy 'HOWTO' on the net which helped enormously. Click

Interestly I discovered that there is a whole bunch of stuff in the kernel switched on by default that you probably wont need and a lot of scope for optimisation too. The distribution we use for JDS (Suse as I'm sure you know) is very generic, obviously to support as wide a variety of machines as possible, so I guess this isn't much of a surprise really.

Certainly perked up the speed of my laptop once I'd unloaded some of the stuff and selected the appropriate processor optimization.

Wireless access is my next hurdle...!

( Dec 20 2004, 01:27:05 PM GMT / Dec 20 2004, 01:27:05 PM GMT ) Permalink Comments [1]
Trackback: http://blogs.sun.com/Drew/entry/linux_kernels


Yep, me.
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