A bit OT, but this issue about FAT patented by MS is not a real one to be worried about, some experi

  • Thread starter Thread starter Jan Panteltje
  • Start date Start date
J

Jan Panteltje

Got myself one of those multi-card adapters (an Imation Flash Go).
Printed out the USB parameters.
Wrote a script ot automatically mounts it in Linux.
The folowing works without problems:

umount /dev/sdb1
mkfs -t ext2 /dev/sdb1
Now we have ext2 on the SmartMedia card I am using ;-)
(That should work with any type card this adapter accepts).

mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/cards

cp whatever /mnt/cards/

and if no longer needed
umount /dev/sdb1



So, now we can also put Linux on it I think :-)

But more interesting, if I want to take my movie.avi to
and other Linux PC:

dd if=movie.avi of=/dev/sdb1 bs=1000000 count=500
It is important to use dd and not cat, and limit the size,
else the thing hangs until you remove the card....

And now play it anytime (without any mounting at all):
cat /dev/sdb1 | mplayer -

For a good big size movie you need USB 2.
So, for only one movie of file per card, no need for a file system at all.

I am doing all this is Suse with the old usbmgr.
Here is the entry I used in /etc/usbmgr/usbmgr.conf for Imation-Go
# Imation FlashGO! USB flash memory card reader/writer
# CompactFlash I-II, SmartMedia, Memory Stick, MultiMediaCard, Secure Digital, IBM Microdrive
vendor 0x718 product 0xb00c script mount_card_adapter module scsi_mod, sd_mod, usb-storage

Here is the mount_card_adapter script:
#!/bin/sh

case $ACTION in
add)
# echo "mount_card_adapter start" > /tmp/log
mount -o ro /dev/sdb1 /mnt/cards
# you could do this separately if you are going to write to the card
# mount -o remount -o rw /dev/sdb1
;;
remove)
# echo "mount_card_adapter stop" > /tmp/log
umount /dev/sdb1
;;
esac
 
Got myself one of those multi-card adapters (an Imation Flash Go).
Printed out the USB parameters.
Wrote a script ot automatically mounts it in Linux.
The folowing works without problems:

umount /dev/sdb1
mkfs -t ext2 /dev/sdb1
Now we have ext2 on the SmartMedia card I am using ;-)
(That should work with any type card this adapter accepts).

mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/cards

cp whatever /mnt/cards/

and if no longer needed
umount /dev/sdb1
Click to expand...
Just fyi,
While Microsoft have patents on FAT, they are only enforcing it on
whomever sells devices/hardware preformatted as FAT. Thus you should
easily be allowed to use the already formatted SmartMedia.
(that is until MS wants to excercies the patents on FAT implementations/
readers as well.)
 
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