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Linux Drivers for Avatar Drives?

Posted by Cliff on from the more-reasons-companies-should-publish-specs dept.

eoPh asks: "I recently aquired myself an Avatar Shark, a beautiful little portable 250meg removable disk drive. I only have one slight little problem. The company that makes these suckers has gone bankrupt and I need some linux drivers or even some good information so I can begin coding my own. Maybe an ex-employee of Avatar reads /. and is willing to help, because I don't think that I'm the only person to have run into this problem. " This is the classic case as to why I feel companies should open their specs. When I buy a device, I want to know what I'm getting and how it works. I don't want to become utterly dependent on the company that makes it, because it might not be around forever.

2 comments

  1. Re:Linux support is available! by System+Panel · · Score: 1

    First you need a newer kernel, in the kernel u must enable support 4 Parallel port devices, and then u must also activate the scsi driver for it using the EPAT protocols. After all that is done then you can compile ur new kernel and use the modules: paride, epat, and pd as mentioned above.... I've had a avatar shark 250 4 a long time and I do backups of /home and /etc to it every weekend... I just wrote up a nice backup shell script which loads the drivers, dumps the files 2 a tgz and throws them on the disk, and unloads the drivers and warns me to eject the disk before I disconnect the drive from my parallel port.. :-)

    --
    System Panel (Linux When Possible, WinDOH's when nothing else is avalible)
  2. Linux support is available! by rak3 · · Score: 2

    Today is your lucky day, very nice drive, so small and portable! You didn't specify parallel port or PC Card version, but here's the instructions for the Parallel port version:

    (as root)
    modprobe paride
    modprobe epat
    modprobe pd

    Good Luck!