Grant R. Guenther (grant@torque.net)
Fri, 15 May 1998 20:42:25 -0400 (EDT)
> > I just heard about paride today, and was wondering what is the
> > status of the pg driver? I installed 0.94 but still there isn't any
> > support for parport cd recorders (hp 7110e). When will the driver be
> > available?
Development of pg got delayed for several reasons, some personal, some
related to communications problems with the developer of the userland
program that will interface to my driver. And of course, as Dave
points out:
> Unless a developer has physical access to the device it is near
> impossible to write a driver (I crashed my Linux box several dozen times
> trying to fix various problems). If you look at Grant's list of supported
> devices there must be several thousand dollars of gear hanging off the
> back of his machine. Grant doesn't have bottomless pockets.
As it happens, I've just today (!) bought an ATAPI CD-R drive. The price
here finally fell below the threshold that I set for getting one myself.
Dave also suggests:
> Much of the critical information is "proprietry" and manufacturers will
> not normally release this without a non-disclosure agreement (which
> prevents making the driver source code available). If you can get this
> information out of HP, congratulations, you have the most important bit of
> information required.
In the case of the HP 7100e/7200e drives, we're fine on that front.
HP does publish the necessary information for the ATAPI drive itself, and
the cdrecord program already works fine with the drive. The parallel port
interface is the Shuttle EPAT, which is also in _many_ other devices
that appear on my web pages, and for which I have the specs.
So the only problem is designing the interface between pg and cdrecord.
I believe I have that under control, and now I have some suitable
hardware to actually test with.
By the way, I'm building pg with the idea that any _any_ ATAPI device
supported by cdrecord together with any supported PARIDE adapter will
work. So, for instance, when MicroSolutions new CD-RW drive comes out
later this year, we should already have a driver for it :-)
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Grant R. Guenther grant@torque.net
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Wed 30 Dec 1998 - 10:17:44 EST