Linux + Firewire, any comments?

Slasher · 10-03-2002, 09:41 AM

Planning to buy a Western Digital firewire harddrive and a Tekram TR-1394C PCMCIA firewire card in the near future, and I'm going to use linux (Redhat 8.0 I presume).

Anyone got some hands-on experience with linux and firewire, in general, or related to the listed hardware?

Any contribution would be greatly appreciated.

viciousfish · 10-04-2002, 06:16 AM

Yes. It's not great, but it works, about as well as it does under windows, but not as well as it does under mac.

I've had some success with a fire-wire camcorder under SuSE 7.3, and a Fire Wire webcam.

Slasher · 10-04-2002, 07:19 AM

Thanks for the input viciousfish, guess I'll find out sooner or later.

No surprise that macs and firewire works like a charm

MasterC · 10-05-2002, 01:00 AM

No surprise that mac and anything work great together. mac's rule but that's all just because they make both their own hardware and software, AND because the latest release of their OS is based of a BSD flavor or so I heard

Anyway, I have had a bit of success with Firewire. I use it to transfer my digital video from my digital camcorder to the hard disk for editing and such. Works great for me, but that's not a hard drive, so I really can't directly answer the question. I do know that there are options for Firewire hard disk support in the newer kernels.

Cool

finegan · 10-05-2002, 04:31 AM

Firewire got gutted and rebuilt on the interface layer in the middle of the 2.4.x series, odd thing to do in the center of stable huh? With the drive to USB 2.0 on the PC support oddly enough isn't languishing. Support for desktop interface cards is only about 3 months back from the introduction of newer chipsets, which is actually really good for hardware. PCMCIA card support I just don't know about, might want to also check at the pcmcia-cs page. Everything firewire is treated as a SCSI layer, so, just like IDE CD-RWs, its never the drive you have to worry about being compatible, just the card.

1394's HCL is pretty solid:
http://www.linux1394.org/cgi-bin/hcl.cgi

Cheers,

Finegan

Slasher · 10-05-2002, 06:45 AM

Thanks for the info, found the chipset for the PCMCIA card on the compatibility list, it works. Not great, but works.

I have pretty much decided to go for the drive and the cards, so I guess we'll see