[rescue] IRIX and USB

[Joshua Boyd]

On Thu, Jan 13, 2005 at 02:42:06PM -0500, Kevin wrote:
> I've got an Octane, to which i would like to add USB ports.  Is
> this just a matter of getting the PCI cage and a USB PCI card?  I
> would assume that i would need to get a card supported under IRIX
> 6.9.2x.  Anyone know what cards are supported?
> 
> I would like to be able to use my USB flash drive and sync my USB
> palm phone.  The phone thing i'm pretty sure will work but does
> anyone know if IRIX supports removable USB storage devices?

There are absolutely no reports of USB working on anything less than
Origin 3 derived machines (Fuel, Tezro, Orgin 3x0(0)s, Onyx3x0(0)s), and
then, only for keyboard, mouse, and a sound adapter on fuels.

If you could find what chipset they use, you could try to find a PCI
card that has the same chipset.  Then you might have to hack the driver
a bit (to recognize the PCI card as belonging to that drive, and
changing devices paths around as is needed for the Firewire cards in
Octanes).  Maybe I make this sound hard, but it might not really be that
bad if you follow the DM10 clone hacking as a guideline.

Then, after you do that, apparently the infrastructure isn't there to do
much.  But, if you feel like writing drivers...  Maybe port a libusb for
things that can be done from userland.  That should make pilot-link
happy (assuming that you kept you libusb happy).  Hack up a SCSI device
driver for flash storage, etc.

No where near as elegent a solution, but I just have a Sun on the
network with USB2.0 card, and I use that for my USB flash card.  I have
my palm pilot connected to a linux machine, but I keep meaning to try it
on the Sun as well.

BTW, do you use your palm on linux?  If so, what GUI?  I'm having
trouble getting the old jpilot to work with USB devices.  I don't really
want to have to use Evolution or the Gnome-pilot stuff.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd
jdboyd at jdboyd.net
http://www.jdboyd.net/
http://www.joshuaboyd.org/