title: Firewire on CentOS 5.4 link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2009/10/29/firewire-on-centos-54/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 220 created: 2009/10/29 21:10:16 created_gmt: 2009/10/29 21:10:16 comment_status: open post_name: firewire-on-centos-54 status: publish post_type: post

I’ve had quite a few posts on the subject of Firewire (IEEE1394) support in various distros, including CentOS. This is the first since I upgrade my main workstation at home with CentOS 5.4.

As far as I can recall all you had to do in previous releases of CentOS was install the centosplus kernel and the relevant packages (listed below). On upgrading to CentOS 5.4 this didn’t work as expected. Following are the steps I took to get it working.

First, I installed the latest centosplus kernel, currently kernel-2.6.18-164.2.1.el5.plus, and then the following packages:

libavc1394-0.5.3-1.fc6 libraw1394-1.3.0-1.el5 libdc1394-2.0.2-1.el5 dvgrab-3.0-1.el5

That last, [dvgrab](http://linuxcommand.org/man_pages/dvgrab1.html), is a console mode utility for pulling data off a minicam via its firewire interface. It comes from the [kino](http://www.kinodv.org) project, named for the graphical video editor it produces.

Once the packages are installed, I went into /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-firewire and comment out the “blacklist firewire-ohci” directive.

Next I fixed up the default device permissions by editing two additional files.

In /etc/udev/rules.d/50-udev.rules:

Added GROUP="disk", MODE="0660" after NAME=xxx to each firewire (ieee1394) related line.

In /etc/security/console.perms.d/50-default-perms:

Added under device classes

<firewire>=/dev/fw[0-9]*

Changed <console> 0600 <raw1394> 0600 root

to

<console> 0600 <raw1394> 0600 root.disk

and added

<console> 0600 <firewire> 0600 root.disk

Finally, I added all users I wanted to access tools like dvgrab or kino to the system disk group.

I did a system reboot to effect all these changes and then used dvgrab to dump some video off my minicam as a test.

Copyright 2004-2019 Phil Lembo