[vox-tech] IDE cdrw/dvdrw
Peter Jay Salzman
vox-tech@lists.lugod.org
Fri, 2 Apr 2004 05:33:48 -0800
hi ed,
On Thu 01 Apr 04, 11:04 AM, Edward Elliott <ed_elliott@email.com> said:
> I just wanted to contribute my successful novice experience. Last year I
> struggled with getting the Gentoo 2.4 release to support my DVD and CDRW
> drives. But just recently I reinstalled Gentoo with the new 2.6 kernel.
> I enabled hotplug and installed K3B and it automatically recognized my
> drives and worked with absolutely no extra effort on my part. No
> fooling with fake SCSI defs or anything else. It just worked.
there are two things that need to happen for your hardware to work:
1. the kernel must know what to do with it.
2. the user space application must know what to do with it.
without #1, the app has no way of accessing the device. without #2, you
can't do much with the hardware.
when you say "no fooling with fake SCSI defs(?)", what you actually mean
is:
my gentoo kernel had the necessary modules already built in, so i
didn't have to rebuild my kernel or make the ide-scsi module.
most linux distributions "kitchen sink" the kernels. everything is
built in or built as a module to support a wide variety of user base.
it might seem like i had to fool around with "stuff", but that's only
because i build my own customized kernels; i've chosen my lot in life.
:) i wouldn't have it any other way, if for no other reason that
everytime i want to accomplish something (like getting an ATAPI dvdrw to
work) it's always a learning experience. with every encounter i get, i
become more knowledgable about linux and hardware in general. a few
days ago, i didn't have the foggiest clue what ATAPI was.
in reality, the person who made your kernel went through steps very
similar to what i did to get my drive working.
and about "fake SCSI" --- this is a bad term to use. there's nothing
fake about it.
you see, ATA is a very dumb hardware/software standard. on the software
side, it defines bus timings, seeks, reads and writes to a simple block
device, and that's it. ATAPI extends the ATA somewhat. it has its own,
still simplistic, transport layer. it actually has a set of different
transport layers, but there is a standard which is used by most (but not
all!) ATAPI devices.
OTOH, SCSI is a very feature rich and powerful transport layer.
in order to make access to ATAPI devices more simple, most OS kernels
have a driver that translates SCSI calls (*real* SCSI calls) to the
transport protocol used by ATAPI. this simplifies the writing of the
device driver since SCSI is high level. think of using SDL versus
writing an application in xlib. there are other benefits, like more
programmers are more familiar with SCSI programming than whatever the
ATAPI transport layer is called.
and when i say "most OS kernels", i'm not just talking about unix.
microsoft windows does the exact same thing.
> Now, that was a great user experience. This is the kind of thing that
> will make 2.6 + KDE more popular as a desktop solution.
KDE. bah! qt is ugly.
however, i have a confession to make. i liked GNOME (although i would
never use GNOME) because IMHO, gtk is MUCH prettier than qt. actually,
i *used* to like gtk. the gtk 2.0 widget set is the ugliest thing i've
ever seen. i installed the development version of gimp on one of my
systems. within minutes, i kicked that thing off my system and went
back to gimp 1.2. they call that progress? ick.
joe arruda had a profound effect on my life: i will be using nothing but
enlightenment till the day i die. i don't know if he's reading vox
traffic anymore, but if he is... "joe, thank you for 'enlightening' me".
on the subjects of widget sets, i have a deep dark secret that i've
never told anybody but my wife, but now i'm going to let it all hang
out. i really love microsoft's widget set. it's beautiful, feature
rich and intuitive. i wish someone would clone it.
there, i said it.
it's really too bad that a) the windows kernels suck so badly, b)
windows developers are so stupid that they can't break out of the
"everything must be a GUI paradigm and c) the design of the OS is so
flawed.
but the widget set? love it. please don't hate me.
> The one advantage I have in Windows is that CDRW disc is recognized
> as a valid drive by the file system. That allows me to read and write
> files directly on it, using OpenOffice, or any other app. I have not
> yet been able to get this enabled on Gentoo, even though I have RW
> defined in FSTAB for the CDRW device.
intriguing. there's really no reason, ipso facto, that linux can't do
this.
this feature is probably part of MS windows kernel. on linux, it would
be implemented by a small kernel module and a user space application
(like OO). most likely the reason you can't do this on linux is that
nobody has written it yet.
give it time. if it isn't written yet, it will be. that's the werid of
the open source world.
pete
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Peter Jay Salzman <p@dirac.org>
> Date: Thu, 1 Apr 2004 05:20:22 -0800
> To: vox-tech@lists.lugod.org
> Subject: [vox-tech] IDE cdrw/dvdrw
>
> Re: hi all,
> Re:
> Re: i bought a memorex EIDE cdrw / dvdrw. the box didn't say ATAPI, neither
> Re: did the manual, but looking at dmesg, this drive registered with the
> Re: kerel as ATAPI.
> Re:
> Re: i've never played around with IDE-SCSI CD writers before. all my
> Re: experience is with pure good ol' SCSI.
> Re:
> Re: looking through the kernel config, i found a driver called ide-cd which
> Re: looks like what i want (can someone confirm this?).
> Re:
> Re: i made the ide-cd module and insmoded it.
> Re:
> Re: according to the cdrecord man page, i need to specify the SCSI device
> Re: name with the transport layer. the SCSI transport layer is default, so
> Re: instead of what i'm used to:
> Re:
> Re: cdrecord -audio -v dev=0,5,0 *.wav
> Re:
> Re: i now need to specify a transport layer:
> Re:
> Re: cdrecord -audio -v dev=ATAPI:0,5,0 *.wav
> Re:
> Re:
> Re:
> Re: this means i need to get a SCSI device number for my new ATAPI drive. i
> Re: did:
> Re:
> Re: cdrecord -scanbus
> Re:
> Re: and saw all my SCSI devices, but not the ATAPI CDRW / DVDRW.
> Re:
> Re:
> Re: any suggestions?
> Re:
> Re: for those of you with ATAPI CDRW's or DVDRW's: can you please run
> Re: "cdrecord -scanbus" and tell me if you see your device in the output?
> Re:
> Re: thanks!
> Re: pete
> Re:
> Re: --
> Re: Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. -- Albert Einstein
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>
>
> Ed Elliott
> (707) 428-6620
> Ed_Elliott@email.com
>
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--
Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. -- Albert Einstein
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