MUT (Media Utility Tool) open testing

[Guest]

I hope someone is still checking this thread...
how does one get MUT to load two floppy drives?

[Jesse]

Hi,

Floppy disks are a bit archaic on the 2.4 kernel, you can't easily detect them in a nice way. i.e. if they are not there, MUT would lockup for a long period.

To give yourself an access point to the second floppy disk "fd1"
edit the script file /usr/lib/mut-0.0.7b/mut.tcl
about line 363 you will see this:

if {$::majorBusRev(fd) >= 0} {
set ::diskStats(fd0) "$::majorBusRev(fd).0.fd.floppy"
if {$::debug} {puts "set ::diskStats([lindex $line 2]) $::diskStats([lindex $line 2])"}
}


change it to look like this for second floppy drive:

if {$::majorBusRev(fd) >= 0} {
set ::diskStats(fd0) "$::majorBusRev(fd).0.fd.floppy"
if {$::debug} {puts "set ::diskStats(fd0) $::diskStats(fd0)"}
set ::diskStats(fd1) "$::majorBusRev(fd).1.fd.floppy"
if {$::debug} {puts "set ::diskStats(fd1) $::diskStats(fd1)"}
}

Jesse

[BarryK]

Hi Jesse,
Did you get the p.m. I sent you awhile back ...at least a month ago I think.
Regarding improvements needed to get MUT working properly on puppy2.
Also, one of the bugs applies to puppy1 also -- usb drives formatted as "superfloppies" do not work in MUT.

And another:
I just answered another thread, someone mounted a floppy, and all filenames were truncated to 8.3 format. A msdos floppy can be mounted as vfat to fix this.

[HaJo]

Some USB devices take ages to initialise, like 25-30 seconds, during this time MUT can look like it has locked up.

Is there a "working..." message ?

I noticed (in Puppy 1-0-8r1) that MUT has a startup-delay of 4-8 seconds,
from the moment the icon is clicked until the MUT-window appears.
It would be nice to have a faster response (e.g. just an empty window
with a message "scanning devices").

Or maybe the windowmanager should display a "Busy" cursor.
As it is now, it looks as if nothing had happend for several long seconds...

[BarryK]

I'm getting around that in latest puppy2 by always loading usb-storage driver
at bootup.
There are reasons not to do that at bootup, one is that it slows boot-time, as have
to wait for it to complete, else kernel can crash.
However, I'm now loading it in the background after X has started.

[Jesse]

Hi Barry, Yes I got the PM, and have started looking into it.
The trickiest part is getting it to handle the superfloppies correctly.
I am looking into getting that working right, but I need to brush up on my tcl skills, its been a while
I hope to have an update for you in April.
I think that MUT only mounts vfat, as 'vfat' is used where 'msdos' would have been identified, MUT identifies a filesystem using its guess_fstype program.

I am shifting home at the moment, and will have a few weeks without internet, so I will likely find some time to get on top of this for you.

Hi HaJo, yes there are a few short delays, but I think they come from identifing cdrom drives, which takes a little time, unfortunately tcl does not appear to be able to offer a way around kernel functions that take several seconds to execute... one day when I rewrite it in C, I can work around that.

Jesse