Claus-Justus Heine (claus@momo.math.rwth-aachen.de)
29 Jun 1998 15:26:13 +0200
I have made some progress w.r.t. to supporting the parallel port
floppy tape drives with the Micro Solutions backpack interface, such
as the Iomega Ditto product line, some tape drives by Seagate and
Exabyte.
The new driver is supplied in source level form under the protection
of the GPL. I has been developed by reverse engineering using Dosemu.
Grant R. Guenther <grant@torque.net> already had done some very useful
work in this respect and was so kind to supply me with his results.
The resulting driver module has to be uses together with ftape +
zftape, much like Jochen Hoenickes' driver for the Colorado trakker.
The modules/ subdir of the ftape distribution contains some stupid
scrips that show how one could load or unload the modules.
Currently, the bpck-fdc.o module doesn't support reading and writing,
but only tape movement without data transfer, i.e. "mt -f /dev/nqft0
reten" might work.
I'm releasing it so that people can have a look at it. I hasn't been
cleaned up and looks ugly and is too big (too much inline functions)
but shows that a driver is possible. I suspect that a first more or
less working version will appear by the end of July.
There is a web page dedicated to this driver at
http://www-math.math.rwth-aachen.de/~LBFM/claus/ftape/bpck.html
but you may as well click through to the develepment section of the
ftape home page and follow the links.
Many thanks to Grant R. Guenther <grant@torque.net> for his very nice
awk scripts, to Tim Jones for supplying me with a Ditto 3200 and also
to Clive Turvey form Micro Solutions, although this might not be the
end that they wanted it to come out.
Ah, yes, the package can be found at the ftape home page.
Click through to the "Development" section and click trough.
Claus
P.s.:
I don't guarantee that the driver will even compile. Despite the
"beta" in the name of this ftape release the bpck-fdc driver is
ALPHA. Don't try to use it unless you are a more or less experienced
(Linux kernel) hacker.
-- Claus-Justus Heine claus@momo.math.rwth-aachen.de http://www-math.math.rwth-aachen.de/~LBFM/clausPGP Public Key: http://www-math.math.rwth-aachen.de/~LBFM/claus/claus-public-key.asc
Ftape - the Linux Floppy Tape Project WWW : http://www-math.math.rwth-aachen.de/~LBFM/claus/ftape Mailing-list: linux-tape@vger.rutgers.edu
-- To unsubscribe, send mail to: linux-parport-request@torque.net -- -- with the single word "unsubscribe" in the body of the message. --
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Wed 30 Dec 1998 - 10:17:54 EST