Hi,
-I've just installed slack 10.0, but I have some problems getting my external firewire hdd(ntfs), to work.
In the installation procedure, slack recognized my hdd as /dev/sdb1, and i created a mount point for it. Now, when I go see in nautilus, the mount point is there, but empty.
How do i get this to work??

-Another question: I can't type special caracters like the "at" sign. With my keybord I have to press alt-gr+other key , but that doesn't work.
My xorg.conf says: keybord: pc105 and layout: be (which should be ok)

-Last question : What filemanager shuold I use? I use fluxbox as WM, but when I open nautilus from a terminal, I get also a gnome desktop?

Thanks in advance!

You pluggend the drive in, created the mount directory, but did you call the command "mount /dev/sb1 <the rest of the mount command I can't think of off the top of my head>"?

not sure on the keyboard.

For a file manager for fluxbox I like Rox. (You can get it on linuxpackages.net)

ungluun-
I had a similar problem with an external firewire dvd/cdrw attached to a laptop. I could install Slackware 10 on the laptop via the firewire dvd, but after the install the dvd was not there....

I had problems with Slack 9.1 which required me to apply a small script and then issue a "rescan-scsi-bus" command at a terminal as su...

Something about how the kernel handled firewire in 2.4.20 (mostly correctly) and in 2.4.21 (not very good at all, apply patch and run script) and in 2.4.26 (better, but not where it should be)

Hopefully, things will be back to normal in 2.4.27 (I have no idea how firewire acts in 2.6.X)

From bugzilla.redhat.com:
=============================================
Additional info from the IEEE 1394 for Linux Mailing Lists

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/f...&forum_id=5387

The difference between the 2.4.20 and 2.4.21 kernels is that old
versions of sbp2 added all SBP-2 devices (that were found when
the sbp2 driver was loaded) before the SCSI driver run the
initial bus scan. With the new sbp2 driver, the devices ar added
a bit later, which requires a manual bus rescan to activate the
devices at the SCSI layer.

A technical explanation why this was changed is here:
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/m...msg_id=4435487

------- Additional Comment #4 From Bill Nottingham on 2003-08-08 17:25 -------

OK, so, becuase they couldn't fix a refcounting issue to avoid an oops on manual
unload of a different module, the change was made to make the storage adapter
driver require manual intervention, unlike *every single other storage adapter*
in the tree? WTF?

Am I misreading this here?
==============================================
As of 2.4.26 things still aint right with SBP2, scsi, and firewire....

ANYWAY, enough background.

With your firewire drive attached and powered on, get into a terminal window and su. Type in:

rescan-scsi-bus and then enter.

your drive *should* show up after a couple of seconds of scanning.

You'll need to do this each time you restart your machine and want to use this drive. I don't know how to make the change permanent (prolly insert the rescan command into one of the init scripts, but which one?)

Hope this helps....

Speedbump, I thought about rescan but Ungluun said it was recongnized as /dev/sb1. Isn't the point of rescan bus to have it become recognized on the bus? It would not hurt to try though. Ironically I use 1394 all the time in Windows but not too often in Linux. As you said the support is not quite consistent yet.

EDIT: Ah I missed that it showed up "at installation", which I suppose implies the /dev/sd1 is not recognized under normal operation. mea culpa.

Yeah, at installation on Slackware 10 it works....

It's only after you re-boot and try to access the drive that it's gone missing....

Rescan is a hack, but it works.

I've got my fingers crossed that SBP-2/SCSI/Firewire issues are finally fixed in 2.4.27. Looks like this may be the case cause the kernel folks are doing a lot of I/O stuff.... preliminary SATA support, etc...

but, you never know....

Thanks speedbump!
The rescan did the trick

The solution still needs some tweaking:
When I try to acces the disk as a non root user it fails: it says it is a read only disk(ntfs). With my other disks i solved this by adding umask=0 to fstab, but I can't do it with this one because he fails to mount on boot.

When I try to change the mermissions:
root@Slackware:/mnt/mp3# chmod og+rx /mnt/mp3
chmod: changing permissions of `/mnt/mp3': Read-only file system
root@Slackware:/mnt/mp3#
->it doesn't let me.

What should I do?


-And is there an init script where iI can add the line: rescan-scsi-bus, so that the disk mounts directly on boot?

Take care to not write on ntfs drive as it can corrupt datas.

For the keyboard did you try to set your locale LANG in /etc/profile.d/lang.sh
http://www.freenix.fr/unix/linux/HOW...ian-HOWTO.html

/etc/rc.d/rc.local is your init script

Not quite related but the 2.6.7 kernel seems to automatically find my firewire drives and add them using udev. So it 1394 support might be on the upswing in the 2.6.x series. (On the downside my HP DVD burner is not recognized. )

It is giving me headaches though because now I want to experiment with udev. I know you can specify in udev to mount a specific drive to a specific mount point (rather than relying on the whole sda1 is the first attached device, etc...) but I don't know how... yet. That's what google is for though.