Microsystems Technology Laboratories > OpenCoral
Opencoral
 

Equipment Controller Prerequisites

Assumptions

At least one master equipment controller card and optional number of slave equipment controller cards have been installed into the equipment controller server. Interlock boxes have been setup for equipments that are to be interlocked. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0, 4.0, or 5.1 has been installed and patches applied. Make sure that you have the kernel-source RPM installed because the kernel headers are needed to comile the driver.

Note
At this point, the Coral equipment driver and daemon will compile and run under either Linux Kernel 2.4 or Linux Kernel 2.6. This has been most extensively tested using RedHat Enterprise Linux including RHEL 3.0 AS for the 2.4 linux kernel and either RHEL 4.0 AS or RHEL 5.1 for the 2.6 linux kernel. While we believe that the equipment controller driver and daemon will also run under other "flavors" of linux based on either the 2.4 or 2.6 kernel, those platforms have note been tested and, as a result, are not officially supported by the members of the OpenCoral team.

The Coral equipment controller board is a full-sized ISA board that is powered by all four ISA power supplies: +5VDC, -5VDC, +12VDC, and -12VDC. Many newer computers use motherboard without ISA slots at all. In this case, an older computer may be used as the equipment controller. Alternatively, one can either use a Linux-compatible ISA passive backplane or a PCI-to-ISA or USB-to-ISA adapter with an external ISA card chassis.

Note
In addition to making sure that your computer has an ISA slot, you also need to confirm that the power supply has the -5V DC rail. Pin 18 of the 20-pin main power connector (a white wire) may be missing on newer supplies conforming to the ATX12V 1.3 and newer standards. Supplies with no connection at pin 18 (and thus without -5V DC will not work with the Coral equipment controller becuase it requires all four supplies specified in the ISA bus specification.

Setup User

Create a eqcsys local user that belongs to equip local group.

# groupadd equip
# useradd eqcsys -d /home/eqcsys -s /bin/tcsh -g equip

Add EQC_HOMEDIR to eqcsys' environment. Also add EQC_HOMEDIR to PATH as well. Add the following line to .cshrc in eqcsys' home directory:

setenv EQC_HOMEDIR /usr/local/eqcontroller
setenv PATH ${PATH}:${EQC_HOMEDIR}/bin