This is a collection of questions I get asked once in a while, which could fall into the category of FAQ's. If you feel that there is some question that ought to be added to the list, please feel free to mail me (but do include an answer, thanks!).
No. The DOS software conforms to the QIC-80 specs about the layout of the DOS filesystem, and it should(?) be a small problem to write a program that can read/write the DOS format. In fact, I'd bet that creating a nice user interface would be a bigger problem.
tar? These are really tar questions: Please read the man page
and the info page. If you have not got it either, try `tar
--help 2>&1 | more'.
If your version of tar is v1.11.1 or earlier, consider upgrading
to v1.11.2 - This version can call GNU zip directly (i.e.: it
supports the -z option) and has an elaborate help included. Also,
it compiles right out of the box on Linux.
ftape DMA transfers gives ECC errors Sadly to say there are some SVGA cards and ethernet cards that do not
decode their addresses correct. This typically happens when the
ftape buffers are in the range 0x1a0000 to
0x1c0000. Somehow, the DMA write cycles get clobbered and every
other byte written gets a bad value (0xff). These problems are
reported to happen with both SVGA and ethernet cards. We know of at least
one (bad?) ATI 16bit VGA card that caused this.
The easiest solution is to put the card in an 8bit slot (it is often not
enough to reconfigure the card to 8bit transfers). Moving the
ftape buffer away from the VGA range is only a partial solution;
All DMA buffers used in Linux can have this problem! Let us make this one
clear: This has nothing to do with the ftape software.
insmod says the kernel version is wrong The insmod program checks the kernel version against the version
recorded in the ftape driver. This is a string in
kernel-version.h, (e.g.: char kernel_version[] =
"1.1.53";) which is extracted from the kernel you are running when you
run `make dep'. If you got the error when you tried to insert the
ftape driver, remove the file `kernel-version.h', type
`make dep ; make' again and the kernel-version.h file
should be updated. Remember that you will have to do this every time you
change to another kernel version.
v1.1.0 kernel wont compile when ftape support is added(Although I haven't heard a lot of complains, I include it here, just to be sure)
This was due to a typo (and a hacker who didn't use ftape himself,
so he never got around to actually test the code he wrote). This is
corrected by patch1.gz, which can be found from the usual ftp
sites.
ftape complains that ``This tape has no 'Linux raw format' ''If you get this complain, try `mt -f /dev/ftape erase'. This
should solve the problem.
tar/mt/cpio/dd binaries/sources/manpages? All of these tools have been developed by the GNU project, and the source
(and man page) can be fetched from just-about any ftp site in the world
(including ftp.funet.fi, tsx-11.mit.edu, and
sunsite.unc.edu). In any case they can be fetched from the
official GNU home site: prep.ai.mit.edu [18.71.0.38]:/pub/gnu.
The latest versions (by 26. march 94) are:
cpio: 2.3 (cpio-2.3.tar.gz)
dd: 3.9 (fileutils-3.9.tar.gz)
mt: 2.3 (cpio-2.3.tar.gz)
tar: 1.11.2 (tar-1.11.2.tar.gz)
gzip: 1.2.4 (gzip-1.2.4.tar.gz)
They all compile out of the box on Linux v1.0.4 / libc
v4.5.19 / gcc v2.5.8 (The rmt program does not
compile out of the box, but it is not needed as it is only used for
accessing the tape drive remotely).
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