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20041007 Thursday October 07, 2004

iPod working on Solaris 10

Got my iPod working with my Solaris desktop. Very cool.

Sometime around the end of July, the support for 1394 mass storage devices (CD-ROMs, DVD-ROMs, Zipdisks, and devices like the iPod - which is just a 1394 hard drive) was integrated into Solaris 10. I run the latest S10 build on my desktop, of course, so I've got the new Solaris 1394 Mass Storage driver, but most of you will have to wait for the next Solaris Express release (any day now).

The new 'scsa1394' driver implements the Serial Bus Protocol 2 (SBP-2) specification, which allows 1394 mass storages devices, like the iPod, to look and act like any other disk that you're used to using. This driver joins the existing collection of drivers know collectively as the Solaris 1394 Software Framework. The framework provides support for FireWire on SPARC and x86 systems and supports both 1394 digital video (DV) camera devices and 1394 conferencing camera ("webcam") devices, in addition to the new 1394 mass storage devices.

So, anyway, I plug my iPod into one of the FireWire ports on my system (it's immediately recognized after the hotplug), mount the drive, 'cd' and/or 'ls' to see the music files (and all the other hidden tidbits in there) and run xmms to listen to my tunes while I'm in my office at work.

Next step, I figure, is to try to get something like gtkpod working on Solaris 10 so that I can add/remove files from the iPod's database, use my playlists, and have a nicer GUI interface. But it's actually pretty cool as it is. I'll post again, though, when I get it working.

In short though, if you use Solaris and you love your iPod, stay tuned for some really cool new stuff coming to your desktop.

(2004-10-07 18:39:30.0) Permalink Comments [12]

Comments:

Very cool. I'm running an older build of Solaris 10 and when I plugged in my iPod it wouldn't even charge the battery. I'll look forward to hearing more about this!

Posted by Dave Tong on October 07, 2004 at 10:02 PM EDT #

Actually, Dave, the ability to charge the iPod oughta work fine (even in older builds). My suggestion is that you try running 'pmconfig'.

What can happen, if there's no 1394 devices plugged in for a long enough period of time, is that the power management will kick in and power down the 1394 ports. (And, unfortunately, once the power's off we can't detect a hotplug anymore).

Try running 'pmconfig', though, with the iPod plugged in. If that's what it is, then the iPod should immediately start charging.

Posted by SteveJay on October 07, 2004 at 10:25 PM EDT #

hi there, I seem to have the greatest difficulty to mount my ipod. I happen to have s10_b72 on a blade 1500. when plugged, the ipod is recognized fine but it's purely "unmountable". #mount -F pcfs /dev/dsk/c1t0d0s0 /ipod mount: /dev/dsk/c1t0d0s0 is not a DOS filesystem. #mount -F pcfs /dev/dsk/c1t0d0s2 /ipod mount: /dev/dsk/c1t0d0s2 is not a DOS filesystem. the thing is that it's only been used on windows so we know it's a FAT ipod the label is readble trhough prtvtoc and the "unmountable" flag is not on any patition I skimmed through FAQ, support forums and so on but so far I'm out of luck. Any clue ? Any help would be greatly appreciated. thx AL #prtvtoc /dev/dsk/c1t0d0s2 * /dev/dsk/c1t0d0s2 partition map * * Dimensions: * 512 bytes/sector * 63 sectors/track * 255 tracks/cylinder * 16065 sectors/cylinder * 1823 cylinders * 1823 accessible cylinders * * Flags: * 1: unmountable * 10: read-only * * First Sector Last * Partition Tag Flags Sector Count Sector Mount Directory 0 0 00 0 29286495 29286494 2 0 00 0 29286495 29286494 #iostat -En ... c1t0d0 Soft Errors: 42 Hard Errors: 0 Transport Errors: 0 Vendor: Apple Product: iPod Revision: 1.51 Serial No: Size: 0.00GB <0 bytes> Media Error: 0 Device Not Ready: 0 No Device: 0 Recoverable: 0 Illegal Request: 42 Predictive Failure Analysis: 0 c0t2d0 Soft Errors: 6 Hard Errors: 0 Transport Errors: 0 ...

Posted by al on November 24, 2004 at 12:19 PM EST #

Hi,

I also have some problems trying to mount an iPod on Solaris 10_b69 running on a x86 machine.
- Trying to mount it (#mount -F pcfs /dev/dsk/c2t0d0s2 /mnt/ipod), i have this error message :
mount: No such device or address
- trying prtvoc, i have this error message :
Unable to read Disk geometry errno = 0x5.

The iPod works fine and also have been used on Windows box, so it sure it's a DOS filesystem.

I'm pretty new to Solaris/Unix, so maybe i'm missing one point.

If u have any hint
Thanks in advance,

------
Sven

Posted by Sven Duzont on November 25, 2004 at 06:05 PM EST #

Oops... yeah, sorry about that. You ran into a Solaris 'pcfs' bug. I've posted about the bug now (and the workaround I'm using to get around it). I wondered if anyone else out there was actually gonna try to use their iPod on Solaris 10! :-) Good luck.

Posted by SteveJay on November 30, 2004 at 10:50 PM EST #

I got problem mounting the iPod on sol10_69 @SunBlade150. the dmesg | grep firewire: Dec 6 12:24:42 slytherin genunix: [ID 408114 kern.info] /pci@1f,0/firewire@c,2/unit@000a2700027d72c5/disk@0,0 (sd0) online after disks && devlinks, it shows entries under /dev/[r]dsk/c1t0d0s[0-7], but only s0 and s2 giving error "mount: /dev/dsk/c1t0d0s? is not a DOS filesystem." while others complaining "mount: No such device or address". Is there something I missed?

Posted by Deni Kurniawan on December 06, 2004 at 01:00 AM EST #

Deni, that's fine. Slice 0 (/dev/dsk/c1t0d0s0) is the one you want (actually 'p0' if
you're using Solaris x86). But you'll need to do the workaround I posted about last
week. See http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/SteveJay/20041130 for details on the
bug and on the temporary workaround that I and others are using. That post will
give you the proper syntax and should fix your '... is not a DOS filesystem' error.

Posted by SteveJay on December 06, 2004 at 09:43 AM EST #

it worked now! eventually I had to disable the vold first and googling for an easy binary editor (ends up with bvi.sf.net :) now i'll try the gtkpod thanks a lot.

Posted by Deni Kurniawan on December 07, 2004 at 04:22 AM EST #

I got a question regarding the dcam driver. We urgently needs support for dcam version 1.3! Can you tell if and when there will be support for that on solaris!

Posted by Matthias Gehrmann on July 27, 2005 at 03:11 AM EDT #

Well, the good news is that the "dcam1394" driver source was recently added to the growing list of OpenSolaris source code:
<a href ="http://cvs.opensolaris.org/source/xref/usr/src/uts/common/io/1394/targets/dcam1394/">http://cvs.opensolaris.org/source/xref/usr/src/uts/common/io/1394/targets/dcam1394/
So, theoretically, you (or others) can begin that process at any time. I guess the question is what specifically do you mean by "support" for version 1.3? The existing "dcam1394" driver <u>can</u> be forced to attach to and operate with 1.3 rev hardware, but maybe you are more interested in some specific new feature(s) of rev 1.3? I don't have any specific knowledge about plans beyond basic bugfixes, but if there's a compelling case for it, I'm sure there'll be interest.

Posted by SteveJay on July 28, 2005 at 11:22 PM EDT #

Thank you for your answer and the hint with the dcam source code! I will have a look at it. Our institute is very interested in support for dcam rev. 1.3! At the Max-Born institute fundamental research in nonlinear optics and short-time dynamics at the interaction from matter with laserlight is done. In our department we build controls to synchronize short-pulse lasers with a precision from less than picoseconds. In a current project we need to measure the spatial intensity distribution of the laser profile to generate a control signal for an adaptive optic. Until now all camera tasks are made with analog framegrabbers. In the future we want to use digital cameras connected via firewire, but companies only support Ms Windows nowadays (we are bound to solaris for several reasons). I also got the 1394 Developer Kits from Sun to write apps that use the Solaris 1394 dcam driver. But problems started when we bought a camera with dcam rev. 1.3. I managed to force the dcam1394 driver to recognize the camera (with the help of your blog, thx). Backward compatibility seems not to be very well in the dcam standard. The camera I got uses a resolution that is beyond the rev. 1.04 (i.e. >640x480). I'm able to receive pictures from the camera but the ordering of the rows and columns are mixed up. I also tried another camera, here only the error LED flashed. dcam 1.04 only knows format_0 video mode 1 to 5, our camera uses a resolution of 659x494, so I guess we need format_7 (partial image size format). I only got the specs of IIDC Version 1.3 and got no clue when all the different modes were introduced. Anyway I will have a look at the source code of the dcam driver and compare it with the linux version, maybe I can code something....but if you or sun could provide help I would be appreciated. best regards matthias

Posted by Matthias Gehrmann on August 08, 2005 at 10:59 AM EDT #

I installed a firewire card in my Ultra 80 running Solaris 10. When I connected the iPod, I found nothing w/ a "dmesg | grep firewire". I didn't even get the "do not disconnect" message on the iPod. "prtconf | grep firewire" prints firewire (driver not attached) Any help would be appreciated. Thanks, Jared

Posted by Jared Lambert on February 18, 2006 at 01:06 AM EST #

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