help mounting fc5052 and floppy drive on Bitcurator ubuntu 16

[Matt Pearson]

I'm not sure of what I'm doing wrong. I precisely compiled and installed the Device Side Data application and drivers (several times), but am not seeing fc5025 or the floppy drive. Mount points don't exist for it/them. I tried adding several variations of a mount line to fstab. I also don't see an advanced settings in the Settings UI that would allow me to add floppy drive read/write access for users. I'm hoping that there's a known issue and work-around or that the solution is staring me in the face. Our BC machine is a stand-alone Dell Precision 7720 i5 with a TB drive, partitioned with an ext4 fs.

Has anyone successfully used the fc5025 with the BitCurator environment? Any advice on installing. I'll be crying in my office, hoping for your response.

[Matt Pearson]

When connected, and I lsusb, I do see it as:

Bus 001 Device 007: ID Van Ooijen Technische Informatica

[Kam Woods]

Interesting. I'm seeing the same result testing with a variety of different hardware with a properly jumper'd, otherwise working TEAC FD-55GFR. Drive + FC5025 works fine with the Windows package, but not with the compiled source in Ubuntu 16.04 or 18.04.

Looking at the source, it appears the FC5025 drivers are using the old, deprecated libusb 0.1 API. You're still able to compile the drivers in the current version of BitCurator because it *happens* to *also* include the legacy libusb-dev (although libusb-1.0.0-dev - which has a substantially different API - is now the default), but perhaps something related to device management has changed that prevents the older libusb from properly enumerating attached drives.

Have you tried contacting Device Side to see if they have guidance for recent Ubuntu releases?

Kam

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "BitCurator Users" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to bitcurator-use...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to bitcurat...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/bitcurator-users/cbe1a41f-c2aa-4a79-baa0-d2a36fc5108e%40googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Matt Pearson]

Thanks Kam! I'm on it.

[Matt Pearson]

It's ALIVE!

Device Side promptly responded and advised me to "... edit the supplied 025_fc5025.rules file. Open 025_fc5025.rules in a text editor. Near the bottom, there is a line that begins with SYSFS. Change both occurrences of SYSFS in this line to ATTRS."

Thanks Kam.

[Kam Woods]

Great! I'll add a note on the confluence and a setup doc in the Documentation folder for future releases.

Kam

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/bitcurator-users/c21b8369-05b7-4ad5-8c7c-c4e10670a5b6%40googlegroups.com.

[Johan van der Knijff]

Hi all,

I ran into the very same issue while trying to get the FC5025 to work on my machine (I'm using Linux Mint 18.3 AKA Sylvia, which is equivalent to Ubuntu Xenial). However, after I changed the rules file (as described above by Matt) I still couldn't access the floppy drive. I got in touch with Device Side, and they explained that the user account from which the software is run needs to be a member of the 'floppy' group, which can be done with the 'usermod' tool. So the full procedure becomes:

1. Compile and install the software according to Device Side's documentation
2. In file '/etc/udev/rules.d/025_fc5025.rules', replace the two occurrences of SYSFS with ATTRS
3. Add the current user to the 'floppy' group by running:  
   sudo usermod -a -G floppy $USER
   
4. Reboot the machine
   

After going through the above steps the device is recognized by the software, and now everything works perfectly!

Just reporting this back in case it is of any use to others who may come across this thread.

Cheers,

Johan