User Space Driver for USB Storage Devices?

Zarf asks: "With Linux, if you don't like something, fix it yourself. So when I couldn't get my USB pen-drive to work and none of the canned solutions were satifactory... I took it upon myself to fix Linux. I've posted my solution in my Slashdot user's journal. But it seems to me that there must be a better way to promote my solution. Where should I post my fix so it can help the most people?"

Comments

I suggest...

[KDan]

Posting it on slashdot. I hear lots of people read that site.

Daniel

Re:I suggest...

[jpop32]

Posting it on slashdot. I hear lots of people read that site.

Dude, you failed to include the URL.

The Manufacturer

[rmohr02]

Contact the manufacturer of the pendrive--ask them to place it on their website. If someone had the same problem you had, they would go to the manufacturer. They might even put your code on one of those mini-cds that the put the Windows 98 USB drivers on.

SourceForge

[Baines]

http://sourceforge.net/

Sir

[gazbo]

Slashdot is the wrong place not only for the driver, but also for you. You had a need, and used the open source philosophy to scratch your itch, and then released the code; Slashdot is designed for people who don't actually have coding skills, but instead like to talk about how great open source is because if they could code and if they ever actually needed to, then they could modify software.

Oh, and for people who waste their lives gaming too.

Hotplug

[warmcat]

Maybe you should contact hotplug, so they can consider to either include it in the docs or the package, since it just seems to be a perl hotplug script.

DO NOT DO THIS

[Anonymous Coward]

Please do not do this. It gives the impression that OSS programmers are free labor for hardware companies. Put it on a page on SourceForge or host it on your own site. Make sure, whatever you do, that you do it on your own terms. Do not make everyone else's work worthless by giving it away for free with no reciprocity.

If you needed it and you want to share it with others, that's awesome. But don't let someone else get away with making a buck off of it without putting an ounce of effort into helping you.

If you do approach the company, make it clear that you are willing to sell them a license to distribute it.

Re:DO NOT DO THIS

[passthecrackpipe]

On the contrary, it may signal to hardware developers that OSS developers are a clever buch that are willing to help out to make *their* hardware work. They may become more lenient in publishing hardware specs under reasonable disclosure terms, and who knows, we could get better drivers.....

Re:DO NOT DO THIS

[rmohr02]

You can still sell them the rights to use it under an alternative license so that they don't have to worry about the restrictions of the GPL when distributing the program to customers.

Ehh...

[LinuxGeek8]

Sorry, but I don't get it. What you're doing is adding the device id's to the usb.usermap. If that's all that's needed, you culd just add it to the driver itself, or wherever it is normally put.

For the script, all it does is load the right modules and mount the device, right?
Loading the modules is what hotplug does, and mounting automatically with sync can be done with supermount.

I'm no usbguru, programmer or bashguru, so maybe I'm missing something...
I'd just contact the people from the usb-storage driver, and the hotplug people, if I had issues with it, and it's not clear to me what your isssue exatly was, and what you really needed to do to fix your issue.

Re:Ehh...

[LinuxGeek8]

Btw, what's up with the title "User Space Driver for USB Storage Devices"?
You're still loading the kernel drivers to talk to the device, and mount that. If you mean the automount script, that's not really a driver.

If you really need user space you could look at libusb, all that libusb needs is a driver loaded for the host controller, and for the rest it should be able to talk to the device from userspace. But if it can do usb-storage, I have no clue about that.

Re:You did this in Perl

[Sembiance]

Any thoughts to port it to C and releasing it as a closed source driver? Might make a couple bucks...

Your promoting recoding into C, making it closed source and then SELLING it for profit?

What kind of geek are you?

Any Success Stories?

[Schlaegel]

Does anyone have a success story for these sticks working out of the box on a linux distro.

I have become embarrassed when my Windows using friends want me to copy something onto their usb stick.

I am running Red Hat 9, and can not get the sticks to work. I can dual boot to Windows on the same hardware and they just work.

Re:Any Success Stories?

[satterth]

you'll have to load all the needed modules.

/sbin/modprobe sr_mod

/sbin/modprobe sd_mod

/sbin/modprobe usbcore

/sbin/modprobe uhci

/sbin/modprobe usb-storage

/sbin/modprobe vfat

Re:Any Success Stories?

[Brandybuck]

I think this whole topic is hilarious. Why? Because all the Linux fanboys keep telling me that FreeBSD is antiquated, dying, and doesn't support any hardware. But I can stick any USB Mass Storage device on my system and it just works. Out Of The Box(tm). This includes every thumb drive I've tried, my Olympus digital camera, and that cheesy Iomega USB CDRW at work (it won't burn to CD though).

Of course, FreeBSD by default has a bare bones configuration, so I do a trivial amount of work to allow user mounting of filesystems. But with a KDE icon on my desktop right next to the Floppy and DVD icons, I never even notice how difficult and unfriendly it is.

Frankly, I can't understand why Linux has problems with USB Mass Storage. Is UMass, like SATA, just something that no one in the Linux community paid any attention to until now?

USBMan.com

[Stavr0]

A nice resource for all that is USB. I found some UBS drivers for DOS that allows mounting Pendrives off a strait msdos boot floppy -- something that was supposed to be impossible.

USBman's Linux section