firewire/ieee1394 on blue-and-white g3

[Matt Price]

On Fri, Jun 20, 2003 at 06:58:18PM -0600, bruce woller wrote:
> Hey Matt:
> >I've been trying to get an external firewire drive to work with my
> >blue and white g3.  I noticed an earlier thred on a similar topic
> >seemed to sort of peter out without any reported successes, so I
> >thought I'd ask whether ahyone had had any success with a similar
> >configuration.
> Well yes and no and maybe kinda.  I have the same setup as you do 
> except I also have two 18G U160 SCSI drives stuck in there too and a 
> secondary SCSI host with a scanner hanging on it.   I saw your post 
> about the benh kernel and thought I'd give that a try.  So I did a 
> resync with his mirror.  I built the kernel using a copy of the .config 
> file from 2.4.208d kernel supplied by YD with I2C bit banging and TI 
> PCI Lynx enabled as modules (and the hack bit set in 
> /etc/modules.conf).  Note I did *not* use the latest ieee1394 code but 
> left whatever ben had in his mirror.  It booted!  Also the light on my 
> Smartdisk Firewire CD-RW blinked during boot!  rescanscsibus.sh 
> actually discovered the drive and added it to fstab.  This is all new 
> to me.  gscanbus shows the drive.  Weirdness here - plugging and 
> unplugging the FW cable causes the device to *sometimes* appear on the 
> top of the pictogram and *sometimes* on the bottom (see Bill Fink's 
> comments about this),  Things were looking good so I tried xcdroast.  
> He found the drive and added it as the burn to device.  Well let's burn 
> one!  No cigar here (pun intended).  Xcdroast read the music CD from my 
> built in IDE cdrom but when I tried to burn it he tried and tried for 
> about 10 minutes and then gave up with errors regarding SCSI ioctls and 
> admonished me for maybe not being root (even though I was).  Of course 
> I continued poking it and things went downhill from there.  (I suspect 
> firewire isn't completely stable yet in the PPC Linux domain).

bruce,

that's encouraging, I think!  could you send me a copy of your config
file?  I can check to see if anything's importantly different on mine.

I'm currently mostly using debian, since it installed on _my_ internal
scsi disks -- my ide interface is a bit rough, and I tend to get lots
of disk errors when I run linux off of it.  YDL wouldn't acknowledge
the existence of my scsi disks...  anyway, hopefully with your .config
I will make some progress!


thanks,
matt