Greetings. One of the profs here wants to attach an external, firewire
drive to his linux box, running SL 4.4. I had never used firewire under
linux, but I figured it wouldn't be a big deal to get it going. But as
I dug into the problem, I discovered it wasn't all that simple.
The issue of using firewire under SL 4 was mentioned on this list back
in 2005 (at which time I was blissfully hitting the Delete key for such
messages, I guess), and Connie replied:
> The upstream vendor did NOT turn it on in the kernel.
Indeed, TUV has this to say about the matter:
-----
Firewire is not supported under Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1, 3, or 4.
Some firewire functionality is included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 in
the kernel-unsupported package. However, this was not included in Red
Hat Enterprise Linux 4.
For information on getting firewire functionality on your own, see
http://www.linux1394.org/
-----
The quote above was taken from:
http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/FAQ_80_5735.shtm
OK, it says what it says. And I have no violent objections to building
a custom kernel, although I don't like the maintainability aspect of
doing that.
My question is: why is firewire such an unwanted step-child? Is this
just a reflection of the marketplace, or an Intel-suppressing-TI thing,
or ...? Also, is there any chance the situation will be different in SL 5?
Thanks.
- Mike
--
Michael Hannon mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Dept. of Physics 530.752.4966
University of California 530.752.4717 FAX
Davis, CA 95616-8677
