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7. Hardware Supported by Linux/IrDA

7.1 Obtaining Information about the Infrared Port in Laptops

To get the IrDA port of your laptop working with Linux/IrDA you may use StandardInfraRed (SIR) or FastInfraRed (FIR).

SIR

Up to 115.200bps the infrared port emulates a serial port like the 16550A UART. This will be detected by the kernel serial driver at boot time or when you load the serial module. If infrared support is enabled in the BIOS, for most laptops you will get a kernel message like: 

Serial driver version 4.25 with no serial options enabled
ttyS00 at 0x03f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A     #first serial port /dev/ttyS0
ttyS01 at 0x3000 (irq = 10) is a 16550A    #e.g. infrared port
ttyS02 at 0x0300 (irq = 3) is a 16550A     #e.g. PCMCIA modem port

FIR

If you want to use up to 4Mbps, your machine has to be equipped with a certain FIR chip. You need a certain Linux/IrDA driver to support this chip. Therefore you need exact information about your FIR chip. You may get this information in one of the following ways:

  1. Read the specification of your machine, though it is very rare that you will find enough information there.
  2. Do a cat /proc/pci, though often the PCI information is incomplete. You may find the latest information about PCI device and vendor numbers at the page of Craig Hart http://members.hyperlink.net.au/~chart . From kernel 2.1.82 on, you may use lspci from the pci-utils package, too. The according files for 2.2.x kernels are in /proc/bus/pci.
  3. If you have installed the Linux/IrDA software load the FIR modules and watch the output of dmesg, wether FIR is detected or not.
  4. Though I didn't use them for this purpose yet the isapnp tools, could be useful.
  5. Another way how to figure it out explained by Thomas Davis: "Dig through the FTP site (of the vendor, wh), find the FIR drivers, and they have (for a SMC chip, wh): 
    -rw-rw-r--   1 ratbert  ratbert       743 Apr  3  1997 smcirlap.inf 
-rw-rw-r--   1 ratbert  ratbert     17021 Mar 24  1997 smcirlap.vxd 
-rw-rw-r--   1 ratbert  ratbert      1903 Jul 18  1997 smcser.inf 
-rw-rw-r--   1 ratbert  ratbert     31350 Jun  7  1997 smcser.vxd
    If in doubt, always look for the .inf/.vxd drivers for Win95; Win95 doesn't ship with _ANY_ FIR drivers. (they are all third party, mostly from Counterpoint, who was assimilated by ESI)."
  6. Use the DOS tool CTPCI330.EXE provided in ZIP format by the german computer magazine CT http://www.heise.de . The information provided by this program is sometimes better than with the Linux tools.
  7. There is also a small DOS utility made by SMC, called "FindChip". The package also includes a "FirSetup" utility that is supposed to be able to set all values except the chip address. Look at http://www.smsc.com/ftppub/chips/appnote/ir_utils.zip Warning: The package is not intended for the end user, and some of the utilities could be harmful. The only documentation in the package is in M$ Word format. Linux users may read this with catdoc, available at http://www.fe.msk.ru/~vitus/catdoc/ .
  8. Use the Device Manager of Window$95/98/NT.
  9. You may also use the hardware overviews mentioned below.

7.2 Hardware Overviews

There are some overviews about Linux and infrared capable devices in the WWW:

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