Do all USB PCI cards work in Linux?

Xamindar

I have a very old webserver that doesn't have usb on it. I want to add in a USB PCI card so I can connect up a webcam and experiment with streaming the webcam. Anyone know if any one will work or if there are only certain ones? I assume that they will either be ohci or uhci so that any will work. But before I spend the $10 bucks on one I'd like to know.

Thanks.

I was looking at getting something like this simple thing:
http://shop4.outpost.com/product/3665445?site=sr:SEARCH:MAIN_RSLT_PG

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Tue Oct 04, 2005 8:13 pm Post subject:

Xamindar,

ohci and uhci are variants of USB 1.1, you may struggle to fince USB 1.1 cards new now.
ehci is USB 2.0. Its backwards compatible with USB 1.1 too.

I'm not heard of any nasty stories.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

Xamindar · Posted: Tue Oct 04, 2005 10:03 pm Post subject:

mwilliamson · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 09 Jul 2005 Posts: 83

They are all VIA, NEC or ALI chips as far as I know and they all work ok.

Xamindar · Posted: Sun Oct 09, 2005 11:48 pm Post subject:

I bought a cheap one with a via chipset on it and the machine wouldn't even POST with it. Hmm, is an ancient 100Mhz pentium scsi server not able to support a pci usb card?

Oh well, I'll take it back and try another chipset and if that doesn't work then that's that.

widan · Posted: Mon Oct 10, 2005 12:56 am Post subject:

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Mon Oct 10, 2005 6:59 pm Post subject:

Xamindar,

A 100MHz Pentium 1 will only have 5v PCI slots. Modern PCs have 5V/3.3V slots.
If your PCI USB card was 3.3V only, it won't work but I would be surprised is it stopped the PC from POSTing.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

widan · Posted: Mon Oct 10, 2005 9:16 pm Post subject:

Xamindar · Posted: Tue Oct 11, 2005 4:48 am Post subject:

This board only has 5 pci slots, and like 6 eisa slots. The pci slots act very strange though. The top three are labeled pci1.1, pci1.2 and pci1.3 while the bottom two (separated by 5 isa slots) are labeled pci2.1 and pci2.2. I have found that the top two have to be used by the two scsi controllers I have installed and which I boot from because the machine will try to boot off of its onboard scsi controllers if they are in the bottom slots. One of the bottom slots is used by the ethernet controller which leaves only one slot left (with the top most slot unusable because there is no case expansion panel for it). I tried swapping the usb controller between the two bottom slots and I did manage to get it to pass the bios and on down to the raid controller trying to detect the array but it stopped there. It couldn't detect the array and just seemed to be stuck. Once the card was back out everything was fine again.

I searched google a couple of days ago and found some post saying the chipset of these cards (vt6212) is very picky but I can't seem to find it any more so it must not be that much of a problem.

Is there such a thing as a normal serial webcam? That would fit my requirements. Of course I still need to figure out why zoneminder wont compile.

Thanks for the help guys.

widan · Posted: Tue Oct 11, 2005 9:04 am Post subject:

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Tue Oct 11, 2005 5:25 pm Post subject:

Xamindar,

You could not move the image over a serial port in a realistic time. The best data rate you can get on a serial port is 115,000bits/sec (on a PC) that about 12kB/sec. A 640 x 480 256 colour image. is 307,200 bytes or 25 seconds to transfer uncompressed.

The strange numbering on your PCI slots may be becasue you have several PCI buses. lspci will show that. My a7n8x has three PCI buses (numbered from zero), not including the AGP, which is reported as a PCI bus.

Xamindar · Posted: Thu Oct 13, 2005 4:52 am Post subject:

Thanks for the info widan and NeddySeagoon.

I finally took the usb card back to Frys and bought a different one with an NEC chip on it. I put it in and computer boots up just fine. I loaded the ehci-hcd and also the quickcam module but no /dev/video0 shows up. I must be missing something.

***EDIT***

After reading about the usb modules in the kernel config I learned that I also need to have a usb 1.1 driver installed. So after modprobing ohci_hcd the camera works. YA!