Firewire Support On 'Alternative OSes'?

Omega996 asks: "Does anyone have any experience with Firewire on 'alternative' OSes? I use Linux (SuSE 6.4), FreeBSD, BeOS, and MacOS, and it seems only MacOS (and only recently) has Firewire support for something other than digital video input. I'm a UNIX geek, and I'd rather be using a UNIX variant with Firewire than MacOS 9, but I don't see any support for Firewire storage (disks, CD/RW, etc.). Am I missing something?" Well, here's a link to the Linux 1394 Project, however IEEE 1394 (or, if you are dealing with Sony devices, i.Link) is the generic name for Firewire. Does anyone have any information on such projects for FreeBSD, BeOS and other not-often-heard-from Operating Systems?

BeOS does

[Anonymous Coward]

BeOS supports Firewire in R5. I don't know what cards exactly but I believe the Pyro is supported.

Mike

Re:1394 Naming

[Anonymous Coward]

Other 1394 implementation aren't called "Firewire" because it's a trademark of Apple, period. The royalty has nothing to do with the name - what's being licenced (by everyone who sells a 1394-compatible interface in anything) is the patented hardware design. Most of those patents belong to Apple, although there are other companies receiving royalties in the 1394 consortium. USB is similarly encumbered, but the patents belong to Intel and they can count on vastly larger volume, so they can afford cheaper licencing terms (plus USB parts are simply simpler and cheaper than 1394, so the OEM margins are lower and the licencing hasto be cheaper).

The prior stupidity on Apple's part I referred to above (i a previous post) was in making the patent licensing unrealistically expensive (something like $1 US per interface?), perhaps because they only envisioned 1394 in "high-end" equipment. They've since greatly lowered those fees, and 1394 has begun to trickle into more and more consumer computing stuff (where USB is too slow and limited, and SCSI is a pain in the ass). A high-capacity portable MP3 player would be an example of something cheap (

Re:No

[pb]

Damn! You took the words right out of my mouth!

Someone mod this up...

...well... I thought it was funny.

Maybe it's the caffeine talking. *sob*

Anyhow, what's so surprising about support / lack thereof? I'm amazed Linux has some I2O support, actually.

And wouldn't this be related to USB support?

Oh well, I'll be getting a new computer soon, so I'll probably get to check it out then...

(I'm more interested in DVD Support, though)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].

Firewire

[EuroBryce]

Have you tried Windows 2000?

My first troll :-)

Re:BeOS does

[Omega996]

I only saw mention of Firewire support for digital video; I didn't see anything about using Firewire for mass storage (which is what I'm looking for).

Re:The chief says no

[Anonymous Coward]

He apparently later rescinded that short-sighted and stupid comment, since 1394 support is included in recent 2.3.x kernels, and will thus presumably be in 2.4.

Firewire offers a lot of specific services that just can't be done with USB, ie. it's more than just a faster peer to it (or even to USB 2.0, which will probably never happen anyway). What really needs to happen is for the 1394 people to (a) get the price down, and (b) get the speed up to 1.6Gbps or faster, as quickly as possible. USB 1.1 is fine for mice and things, but it's really unfortunate that people found the need to make storage and network devices for it. Part of that was Apple's dumb original licencing terms, which have thankfully been fixed to be more palatable.

1394 Naming

[rak3]

What Cliff said above is not entirely correct, IEEE 1394 is NOT the generic name for Firewire. Firewire is a registered trademark of Apple Computer, and as such a royalty has to be paid to apple just to use the Firewire trademarked name. So IEEE 1394 is the real name of the standard, and Firewire is just Apple's version of it.

Thats why companies like Sony created their own name for the technology, both to avoid paying Apple and to have something more consumer friendly than IEEE 1394.