Some dude on a forum the other day told me Debian was dead. I dismissed him as as a Gentoo freak until I noticed for the last week…

root@panther:/$ apt-get update
Hit http://mirrors.kernel.org testing/main Packages
Hit http://mirrors.kernel.org testing/main Release
Hit http://mirrors.kernel.org testing/main Sources
Hit http://mirrors.kernel.org testing/main Release
Hit http://security.debian.org testing/updates/main Packages
Hit http://security.debian.org testing/updates/main Release
Reading Package Lists… Done

root@panther:/$ apt-get upgrade
Reading Package Lists… Done
Building Dependency Tree… Done

0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.


No testing updates? Odd.

I wanted to use my external Firewire drive on all my systems. I found that formatting the whole thing for FAT32 was not the answer. The best solution I came across was to make two partitions, one FAT32 and the other HFS+. Windows can read FAT32, OSX and Linux can read both. Super.

The best way to do it is under OS X (10.4.2 in my case) using diskutil. My drive is 160GB, so I did a 100GB FAT32 partition and a ~60GB HFS+ partition. It’s as easy as:

diskutil partitionDisk disk2 2 MBRFormat MS-DOS FAT_VOL 100G HFS+ MAC_VOL 60G

Diskutil will figure out the change on the 60GB partition if you go over the free amount (it came to something like 55G).

You need the MBRFormat parameter if you want Windows to be able to read the FAT32 partition. If in doubt check the man page.

Using either disk under Linux 2.6.x is as easy as:

mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/exthd1/
mount -t hfsplus /dev/sda2 /mnt/exthd2/

You need the vfat and hfsplus modules compiled for this to work of course. Check my Linux 1394 guide for getting the disk to work under Linux.

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.