On Tue, 25 Jan 2000, Alexy V. Khrabrov wrote:
> My IR HotSymc doesn't work, and when trying to
> peruse the resources, I found they are in pretty
> disorganized state. The IR-HOWTO is itself very
> tentative. Many things mentioned are not properly
> introduced -- e.g., there's just a single case for
> Thinkpad, which talks about /dev/irnine, without
> explaining what it is and why you have to run
> mknod yourself.
I believe irnine is an old name for the ircomm device nodes, which have
been assigned _two_ ranges. My Debian machines have two sets of them in
any case - ircomm<x> and ircommnew<x>. With IR up and running (make sure
to ifconfig irda0 up), pilot-xfer works flawlessly albeit a bit slowly. I
even had a friend pick up my palm 3 and point it another direction during
a hotsync, and when I put it back in place the transfer continued.
> So I have a few notes-questions which I think need
> to be addressed in a better-ordered IR-HOWTO and
> perhaps an additional Linux-Palm-IR-HOWTO.
>
> 1. Installation -- the patch -XXX-irda should be
> applied after applying the kernel -XXX itself,
> right? They are two different patches, with
> -irda adding only irda stuff?
Yes. However, 2.2.15-pre3 includes newer IrDA code than 2.2.14-irda1!
> 2. libtool is needed and must be mentioned in the
> HOWTOs.
I agree.
> 3. Kernel options now don't include IrOBEX and
> many other things from IR-HOWTO. How come?
With IrDA sockets, IrOBEX and many other protocols can be implemented in
userspace. So they were removed from the kernel.
> 4. What's the exact order of launching irattach &
> irmanager.
Normally, irmanager launches irattach using a script, /etc/irda/devices if
I recall correctly.
> 5. What freedom between ttyS? you have, why do
> you have to irattach one, what's the
> difference with using /dev/irnine.
Different features. The IrDA hardware device (your IR port, often a dongle
or built in) usually gets detected as a ttyS device. This is what you
irattach to for SIR mode. If you have a supported FIR chipset, you must
instead disable the ttyS port using "setserial /dev/ttyS<x> uart none"
before running irattach (or, for older versions, inserting the fir
module). The irnine was another name for ircomm0, I think, and is used to
emulate a serial cable through an infrared connection.
> 6. Who creates /dev/irnine and /dev/ircomm and
> when. What about that /dev/ircomm0 mentioned?
/dev/irnine, /dev/ircomm and /dev/ircomm0 are probably the same device,
and all obsolete on my system. Perhaps ircommnew* will be renamed back to
ircomm*. You will have to create them yourself if your distribution
doesn't do it for you; they're included in Debian 2.2 and later, at least.
> 7. Who loads ircomm-tty and when -- why do you
> have to do modprobe ircomm-tty manually, and
> if so when, why is it not prescribed by docs?
ircomm-tty will for most users be automatically loaded by kmod when you
try to use the ircomm devices (/dev/ircommnew?).
> What do you do if irattach amd irmanager are
> running, but HotSync does nothing? What's the way
> to check things?
Check that your IR is actually activated. What I missed was just running
"ifconfig irda0 up". This is usually enough to enable IrCOMM:
irattach /dev/ttyS1 -d tekram
ifconfig irda0 up
Note that irmanager is not needed for this! Irmanager does much the same
as cardmgr, but when you open an ircomm device the kernel itself tries to
discover something to talk to.
> I apologize again as many of these things must
> have been discussed. What I've learned is that
> IR-HOWTO is really incomplete and hard to
> summarize for Palm use. Only one case is there,
> as compared with many on this list.
I agree that the documentation should be fixed.
>
> I'd appreciate talking with Palm V and Dell
> Inspiron owners in particular. I don't even know
> what IR chip I have, except there's some FIR.
> Here's a few more hardware-setup questions:
>
> 8. What does it mean when findchip remains
> silent?
No idea. I've never tried findchip (had the good fortune that someone else
had taken photos of a similar laptop's motherboard).
>
> 9. How do you choose SIR port and IRQ, especially
> in the BIOS config?
SIR ports generally act just like serial ports. The most common one is
ttyS1 at io 0x2f8 irq 3. At least mine detects as an 8250, which must be
fixed by "setserial /dev/ttyS1 uart 16550a".
> 10. How do you choose FIR DMA channel?
Depends. Apparently, most of those who had to hardcoded it into their
drivers, by adding it to the probing lists (usually io[], io2[], irq[] and
dma[] or something like that).
> All references in the list are made to Palm III
> with IR Enhancements. Palm V is supposed to have
> it in. Anybody got it right?
I use PalmOS 3.3 in my Palm III, so I expect it to work similarly with
your V, especially if you update it.
Important: IrOBEX is not longer part of the irda-utils. There are two
IrOBEX distributions, one written in C, the other in Python. I use the one
written in C, and it works for me. URL (to both of them):
http://www.ravioli.pasta.cs.uit.no/open-obex/index.html
_______________________________________________
Linux-IrDA mailing list - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www4.pasta.cs.UiT.No/mailman/listinfo/linux-irda
