Opto Driver Version 1.0 Installation Guide

Please backup your system before doing anything else. It is very important, because a misconfigured (or faulty) driver can and will render your machine unusable. You have been warned.

Configuring the Hardware

First thing you need to do is configure the hardware for the operation. This includes configuring the IO address and interrupt request channel. If these are configurable through on-board jumpers, then take the manual which came with the card and use it to set the jumpers apropriately. Take care not to cause a conflict with other devices in your system.

After having configured the hardware, you need to tell the driver what you did.Probing for peripherals connected to the ISA bus is not safe. It can lead to all kinds of failures. For this reason, opto driver will not try to find any cards in your machine itself, but will expect you to tell it where to find the installed hardware. After you install the card in your computer, you must edit the opto.conf file. This file contains entries of the following sort:

name="opto" instance=0 compatible="optoin" class"sysbus" reg=1,0x220,0xe interrupts=5;

This entry (and all similar entries) describes the installed card and here are the propertiess you can set:

For more information about the format of this file see the man page driver.conf(4).

Configuring special device files

Solaris holds special device files under /devices. These files are, although maybe a nice idea, very unhandy. If you want to have shorter, traditional device names under /dev, you must edit /etc/devlink.tab before you install the driver.If you want to be able to access the device through /dev/opto0 instead of, for example, /devices/isa/opto@0,220@opto, then you must do this. If the long device name is OK for you, you can skip this step.

Open the file /etc/devlink.tab with your favourite editor and add a line like:

type=opto;name=opto;addr=1,220;minor=opto opto0

to the end of the file. Replace the number '220' with the address you configured your card for. Please read the comments in this file, as it seems to have some very strange issues regarding whitespace.

Installing the driver

The installation program does not exist. Installation is preformed by make and you must have it installed on the target machine. You will also need root privileges in order to install a driver.

In the directory which contains the driver source, type:

make install

optionally followed by a

make install_doc

if you want to install the documentation also. Check the top-level makefile for the location where the documentation should be installed.

This will build the driver executable, if necessary. Finishing that, it will copy the executable, called opto along with the configuration file, called opto.conf(yes, the one you edited above), to the place where drivers should be. Finally, it will issue necesary commands which will install the driver and introduce it to the system. After this completes, the driver should be installed and loaded.

Special device files now work and can be used imediately. For more information about what can you do with this device, refer to the manuals that describe your hardware and to the users guide.

Removing the driver

If you want to remove the driver from your system, type:

make uninstall

This will unload the driver from the memory, uninstall it, and delete associated files from the disk.

Troubleshooting

If problems occur, you will have to deal with them on your own.