I know I didn’t just pop in a 1394 (Firewire) card into my Linux box, turn it on, and it worked.

The goal is network storage on a removable disk. For all those Googling for “firewire linux” the steps are:

1. I am using kernel 2.6.12. Compile 1394 support along with OHCI-1394, SBP-2 , Raw IEEE1394 support all as modules. I don’t know if you need the last one but it sounds good.
2. Compile SCSI device and disk support.
3. You may need to do some insmod magic, I didn’t.
4. Shutdown, add card, whatever else.
5. tail -f /var/log/syslog and plug the drive in. You should see a bunch of messages from ieee1394 and sda. The drive should be /dev/sda1 or something around that depending on the other devices on your system.
6. Mount. mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt My drive is formatted as FAT32 for compatibility. What sucks is the maximum file size is 4GB. So much for archiving DVD images

If you’re looking for a good Firewire card, Newegg has the Koutech PCI to 1394a Card Model IO-PFW310 for about $15 shipped. Works great with Linux.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 25th, 2005 at 7:26 pm and is filed under Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.