How to get Firewire on Knoppix 6.4.4 Live DVD

[padillah]

I am a real newbie here and I'm trying to capture video from my camcorders. I tried in Windows but that proved futile. I'm now trying to use a liveDVD and see if this will work. If it does then I can spend some energy repartitioning the hard drives and install a permanent solution. Anyway, I'm trying to get Kino to run and it's not seeing any 1394 devices. So I looked at the Kino page and they have instructions that say just: insmod ieee1394 insmod ohci1394 insmod raw1394 ...and it will work. Well I keep getting errors when I try that. I su root, then try the ismods and I get: "can't read : No such file or directory What am I supposed to type? I've been working on Windows systems for years and I've very little experience with Linux. Thanks in advance for the help. Tom P.

[Forester]

Hi padillah and welcome to the knoppix forums.

If, like me, you expect to be able to plug-in a firewire device to your PC / laptop and have it work 'out of the box', I fear you will be disappointed. I don't have fireware capability so all I can do is give you some notes. Since you have little experience with Linux, they make not make much sense in which case, giving up may be your best option.

If, could you open a terminal and type in:

lspci

Scan the output an look for a line that says firewire. E.g.

02:09.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394) [0c00]: Ricoh Co Ltd R5C832 IEEE 1394 Controller [1180:0832] (rev 05)

That's the controller. You are going nowhere until Knoppix can see this. If it can and you've got your camcorder plugged in it might in the output of lspci. I don't know else it would appear.

If the controller isn't there, then you need might need to turn firewire on in the hardware. Look for a (blue) Fn keyboard combination to do this and/or a BIOS setting of some sort.

You might then want to try Windows again . How well firewire is supported will depend on whether you are running XP, Vista or 7 and which SP and perhaps even which hotfixes you have applied.

With Linux the support depends in which kernel you are using (and thus which version of Knoppix). Linux 2.6.12 (June 2005) saw the introduction of the old firewire stack; Linux 2.6.20 (July 2007) saw the introduction of the new Juju firewire stack; Linux 2.6.30 (June 2009) the new stack is supposedly superior to the old; Linux 2.6.37 (January 2011) saw the withdrawal of the old stack.

What does this all mean ? For several years now there has been a choice of firewire stack and different versions of different Linux distributions will use one or the other (and many will allow you change it if you know what you are doing). Documentation, such as that you saw for kino, may be out-of-date in that it refers the old stack and doesn't mention the new one.

The good news is you can't load those drivers because they are the old drivers and Knoppix 6.4.4 has the 2.6.37 kernel, which doesn't have the old stack any more.

The bad news is that if you get your video capture working under Knoppix 6.4.4, repartition you disk and install some other Linux you may find yourself back to square one.

Knoppix tends to build drivers into the kernel. If this is true for the firewire drivers then you can't load them because they are already loaded. So insmod and modprobe are no use to you and you will always get "No such file or directory" when you try.

I can't find the new Juju drivers as loadable kernel modules and there is circumstantial evidence the drivers are built into the kernel. So it should all work. From the terminal type:

dvgrab

If that says:

Error: no camera exists

then the problem isn't kino. For more help, I suggest:

http://kinodv.org/
https://ieee1394.wiki.kernel.org/

These sites don't have forums, they have mailing lists, which means they aren't really there for newbies but you can still ask a question but you would need to provide specific information: you are using Knoppix 6.4.4 with a 2.6.37 kernel; your firewire controller is ... and Linux can/can't see it; your camcorder is .... and dvgrab can/can't see it.

But before you try that you should probably ask whether firewire support is in Knoppix 6.4.4. by posting a question on the Knoppix mailing list.

[padillah]

OK, lspci does give me the line: 05:01.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments TSB82AA2 IEEE-1394b Link Layer Controller (rev 02) (prog-if 10 [OHCI]) Also, when I do lspci -v I get a lump of text like so: 05:01.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments TSB82AA2 IEEE-1394b Link Layer Controller (rev 02) (prog-if 10 [OHCI]) Subsystem: AFAVLAB Technology Inc Device 702a Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 7 Memory at fa104000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=2K] Memory at fa100000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K] Capabilities: [44] Power Management version 2 One thing I noticed was some of the other entries have an extra line. Like my on-board audio: 01:00.1 Audio device: nVidia Corporation GF104 High Definition Audio Controller (rev a1) Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd. Device 2322 Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 17 Memory at fa080000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K] Capabilities: [60] Power Management version 3 Capabilities: [68] MSI: Enable- Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit+ Capabilities: [78] Express Endpoint, MSI 00 Kernel driver in use: HDA Intel This extra line states what kernel driver they are using. The Firewire entry does not have that line. Does that help to know if the system is using built-in drivers? Oh, and dvgrab did give an error: Can't find camera. Hope that adds to the conversation. Tom P.

[padillah]

[Fixed the formatting from above]
OK, lspci does give me the line:
05:01.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments TSB82AA2 IEEE-1394b Link Layer Controller (rev 02) (prog-if 10 [OHCI])

Also, when I do lspci -v I get a lump of text like so:
05:01.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments TSB82AA2 IEEE-1394b Link Layer Controller (rev 02) (prog-if 10 [OHCI])
Subsystem: AFAVLAB Technology Inc Device 702a
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 7 Memory at fa104000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=2K] Memory at fa100000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
Capabilities: [44] Power Management version 2

One thing I noticed was some of the other entries have an extra line. Like my on-board audio:
01:00.1 Audio device: nVidia Corporation GF104 High Definition Audio Controller (rev a1)
Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd. Device 2322
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 17 Memory at fa080000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
Capabilities: [60] Power Management version 3 Capabilities: [68] MSI: Enable- Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit+
Capabilities: [78] Express Endpoint, MSI 00
Kernel driver in use: HDA Intel

This extra line states what kernel driver they are using. The Firewire entry does not have that line. Does that help to know if the system is using built-in drivers?

Oh, and dvgrab did give an
error: Can't find camera.

Hope that adds to the conversation.

Tom P.

[Forester]

Hi padillah,

Thank for fixing the formatting. I'm afraid the news is not all good. Yes, Knoppix can see your firewire controller but, as you suggest, it hasn't loaded any drivers. So I've dug a little deeper.

If you browse /boot or use a terminal to do an ls -l /boot/ you'll see it contains a couple of files vmlinuz-*. These are the Linux kernels - there's a 32-bit and a 64-bit version for Linux 2.6.37. For each there is a symbol table (System.*) and a configuration file (config-*). Linux is a very configurable OS. If you look in the configuration files you find the comment:

# CONFIG_FIREWIRE is not set

This says it all. Knoppix 6.4.4 has no firewire support and I've little reason to suppose earlier Knoppix 6 versions so either.

Yes, you could down load the kernel sources and build yourself a new kernel or just drivers you need but that would be a project in itself and it would pretty pointless with no persistent store.

You will be better off trying the LiveCD of another distribution. One that is more suited to installation to HD. Knoppix is derived from Debian and I've checked that Debian 6 does have firewire support. Ubuntu is a more user friendly Debian based distribution that you will probably find easier to use. Linux Mint is supposedly even easier.

There are plenty of distributions out there, big and small. I suggest you visit their wikis/forums and look for up to date pages on firewire and/or kino before you decide which to try. Here's a site that a good place to start:

http://distrowatch.com/

Good luck,

[klaus2008]

# CONFIG_FIREWIRE is not set

This says it all. Knoppix 6.4.4 has no firewire support and I've little reason to suppose earlier Knoppix 6 versions so either.

In the file /boot/config-2.6.36.1 of Knoppix V6.4.3 you can read

#
# IEEE 1394 (FireWire) support
#

#
# You can enable one or both FireWire driver stacks.
#

#
# The newer stack is recommended.
#
# CONFIG_FIREWIRE is not set
CONFIG_IEEE1394=m
CONFIG_IEEE1394_OHCI1394=m
# CONFIG_IEEE1394_PCILYNX is not set
CONFIG_IEEE1394_SBP2=m
# CONFIG_IEEE1394_SBP2_PHYS_DMA is not set
CONFIG_IEEE1394_ETH1394_ROM_ENTRY=y
CONFIG_IEEE1394_ETH1394=m
CONFIG_IEEE1394_RAWIO=m
CONFIG_IEEE1394_VIDEO1394=m
CONFIG_IEEE1394_DV1394=m
# CONFIG_IEEE1394_VERBOSEDEBUG is not set
CONFIG_FIREWIRE_NOSY=m

My Freecom firewire DVD-RW works fine with Knoppix 6.4.3.

[Forester]

Ah, no real surprise there. More sentimentality. Knoppix stuck to the old stack until is disappeared and when it did, so did Knoppix support for firewire.

Just out of curiosity, does the Freecom firewire DVD-RW work fine with Knoppix 6.4.4 ?

[klaus2008]

Since there is no kernel driver for the FireWire host controller, it is no surprise that dmesg did not show any new information when I switched on my Freecom DVD-RW while running Knoppix 6.4.4.

[padillah]

My Freecom firewire DVD-RW works fine with Knoppix 6.4.3.

Did you do anything to make this happen? Can I just try a Live 6.4.3 version of Knoppix?

Forester,
Thanks for all the help. I know Linux can be customized in most any way I can think of I just don't know things like where to search for the config entries you found.

I'll check out some of the distros you mentioned as well as the config section you suggested.

When I get it running I think I'm going to set up a Linux (SuSE or Ubuntnu, maybe Enlightenment) install on a fresh new 1T drive so I'll have room to grow, but I wanted to get it running first, before I spent too much energy (haha on me).

[klaus2008]

Did you do anything to make this happen? Can I just try a Live 6.4.3 version of Knoppix?

I did not do anything special to make my FireWire DVD-RW work with Knoppix 6.4.3. I think that you should try out Knoppix 6.4.3 because it seems to be the last version of Knoppix with FireWire support. Most likely you will need to download the DVD version of Knoppix 6.4.3 because there is not much software installed on the CD.