Hi, Stanley!
Trying to kill the keyboard, Stanley A. Klein ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
produced 1,6K in 34 lines:
> The first machine has a Conner Tapestor 420 that uses QW5122F tapes (200 MB
> uncompressed, 420 MB compressed). I think this can run under ftape (it is
200 MB native gives 400 MB compressed, and that's the
*optimistic* calculation used by marketing.
> on the list), but I'm not sure about some things. For example, should the
> device be a rewinding or non-rewinding device.
It does not really matter. On a rewinding device you never
have to rewind but you cannot position the tape (well you
can, then the device is closed and rewinded again, though,
before you start writing). On a non-rewinding device you must
remember to rewind to update the tape headers (only true for
floppy tape drives, i.e. if you use ftape).
> If I have to declare a
> buffer, what size should I use?
That depends. If the buffer is to keep the tape streaming,
several MB. If the buffer is the block size of the device,
(a multible of) 10k, IIRC, see the ftape docu.
> The machine runs Corel Linux and Corel
> didn't include an ftape device although they did include the ftape driver.
Tell that Corel :-)
It's pretty hard to detect all of the buggers reliably, though!
> They also included a copy of BRU, which has been useless thus far because
> the setup is close to incomprehensible.
I cannot comment on that one, other than that I assume it
gives you all possibilities but requires that you have at least
basic knowledge about what you want to do (like a car with a
manual gear shift) compared to 'the computer's always right'
(which would be a sort of train ... it can only go in one way,
ever, and never leave the beaten (iron) path laid out by the
constructor).
> It has taken me almost 6 months of
> occasionally searching in a wide variety of places to get this far on a
> product that is supposed to work "out of the box".
Again, tell Corel. :-)
> The second machine has a Sony Superstation. The Linux on that machine is
> Red Hat 6.1. I couldn't find the Sony Superstation on the ftape
> compatibility list. I finally figured out that is because it is an
> EIDE/ATAPI device, which is not covered by ftape. However, the ftape HOWTO
> only talks about the ATAPI driver, not about what it takes to actually
> write the tape (including formats, etc.). I looked at the QIC web page,
> and apparently the running of a tape depends on two specs: the command
> spec and the format spec. I suppose ATAPI is the command spec, but what am
> I suposed to do about the format, and how do I run it? Is there any place
> to look for how to use ATAPI tapes?
You only format floppy tapes (as they try and play 'huge floppy'
... and floppies are formated). Other tapes format themselves
during the write. You just access them with tar, afio, cpio,
dd, ... writing directly onto them (modulo block size).
With that mentioned: I am not sure if the Sony Superstation
is supported at all. There is a definitive chance that it's
not supported, I remember reading something like that here a
longer time ago. Tim Jones will know ...
-Wolfgang
