The Ftape Installation and Usage Guide
This is only one of several sources of documentation for the ftape
driver. You may want to read the
Ftape-HOWTO
(http://sunsite.unc.edu/LDP/HOWTO/Ftape-HOWTO.html
)
as well as the Ftape FAQ.
(http://www.correct.nl/~ftape
)
The ftape-tools
package comes with it own
manual. See Top (info file ftape-tools).
If you have installed this package (The Ftape Installation and Usage Guide
) locally as
part of the The Ftape Manual
distribution, then both, the Ftape-FAQ
as the Ftape-HOWTO
, are installed locally on your computer as
well. In this case, hypertext references in this document refer to the
locally installed versions instead of the the locations given above
which might be more recent. The locally installed versions are dated
21 July 2000.
The ftape packages are available from either the
or from
ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/kernel/tapes/.
Development versions and beta releases are available from the Ftape home page only.
ftape is a driver for tape drives that connect to the floppy
controller of your computer. There are also special `floppy tape controllers
' that operate at a higher speed. But these are (more or
less) floppy disk controllers that are located at a hardware address
different from the one used by the standard floppy disk controller.
Some (all?) of those `high speed controllers
' are supported by
ftape, namely
Colorado CMS FC-10/FC-20
|
The |
Mountain Mach-II
| |
Intel 82078 based floppy disk controllers
|
This includes (but isn't limited to)
|
Iomega Ditto EZ 4Mbps controller
|
This is a so called Pnp (Plug and Pray, ehem, Play) extension
card. Linux supports the ISA PnP stuff since one of the 2.3.x
versions. Earlier versions of Linux need sp special utilities to
configure PnP card. E.g. the |
Rating specifications of those controllers (i.e. `4Mb
', `2Mb
',
`1Mb
') are to be understood as `Bits Per Second
' NOT
`Bytes Per Second
'
Besides tape drives connecting to those internal FDC controllers ftape also supports certain kinds of floppy tape drives that connect to the parallel port, namely
The Colorado Trakker parallel port drive
|
Support for this drive was added by Jochen Hoenicke. |
Micro Solutions Backpack parallel port floppy tape drives
|
At least the Iomega Ditto product line is supported. Some Exabyte parallel port tape drives -- which in principle also have an interface made by Micro Solutions -- are reported to have problems. |
Please refer to the
for a more detailed listing of supported hardware.
ftape runs under Linux-1.2.13, and Linux-2.0.* up to Linux-2.4.*. Under Linux-2.* it can be used on Intel-x86 machines and on DEC Alpha machines. Ftape probably will not work with Linux-1.2.13 and DEC Alpha, but only with Intel-x86.
If you intend to use ftape with another platform, then I suggest that you try it. And drop me (Claus-Justus Heine) a note, I'm really curious if it works.
You may want to read through the file
[/usr/src/ftape-4.04/]RELEASE-NOTES
for a short revision history of ftape.
What ftape is not:
`[/usr/src/linux/]drivers/char/tpqic02.c
'
instead.
`[/usr/src/linux/]drivers/scsi/st.c
'
instead.
`[/usr/src/linux/]drivers/block/ide-tape.c
'
instead.
See the Ftape-HOWTO(3) for a more complete list of supported hardware.
(1) Conner was taken over by Seagate some time ago
(2) See http://sunsite.unc.edu/LDP/HOWTO/Ftape-HOWTO.html for a more recent version.
(3) See http://sunsite.unc.edu/LDP/HOWTO/Ftape-HOWTO.html for a more recent version.
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