Resources:

• Latest drivers
• Documentation
• Christian Gennerat's site
• The other site [still can't remember where it was]

History:

I wrote toshoboe because I needed it - it took about a week to reverse engineer the the chip using a combination of techniques including decompilation, emulation and using a debugger. At the end I had some drivers that worked well but had lots of VooDoo. After about a year I came across some documentation and Rewrote the drivers from scratch. Various people have fixed things that I missed, and someone kindly ported toshoboe-2.12 to kernel 2.4.x. The future direction (if I can be bothered) is to implement a serial interface to toshoboe so that people can use gnokii and I can use kermit to talk to my HP calculator.

Since then there have been two separate ports to 2.4.x:

• one from the old code [which I think is in 2.4.1] (I'm sorry I've forgotten which brave soul did this)
• one from the new code by Christian Gennerat he has an excellent page at http://libxg.free.fr/irda/lib-irda.html with information about it, his drivers are also mirrored here. Infact since they are a continuation of where I left off you should consider his drivers the latest versions of my drivers, he has even numbered them as such (2.13 and 2.14).

For various reasons he changed the name of the driver to donauboe so if you use the tutorial below with his driver you may want to bear that in mind. You should also visit http://libxg.free.fr/irda/lib-irda.html for information on how to install these 2.4.x drivers. Lots of thanks to those brave souls who plowed through my code to fix it up for 2.4.x thank you all very much.

Tutorial:

• Step 1, do you actually need to be here? Not all toshiba laptops have a toshoboe chip, some have NSC chips. You can see if your laptop does by doing
 
[root@isis /root]# lspci -n
00:00.0 Class 0600: 1179:0601 (rev 2e)
00:04.0 Class 0300: 10c8:0004 (rev 01)
00:06.0 Class 0607: 1179:060a (rev 07)
00:06.1 Class 0607: 1179:060a (rev 07)
00:0b.0 Class 0c03: 1033:0035 (rev 02)
00:11.0 Class 0780: 1179:0701 (rev 22)
00:13.0 Class 0607: 1179:060a (rev 07)
00:13.1 Class 0607: 1179:060a (rev 07)
[root@isis /root]#


If you have a toshoboe chip you'll get a line with 1179:0701 or 1179:0d01 in it, if you don't you haven't and it's as simple as that.

"But," I hear you cry "isn't 1179:0701 a lucent winmodem chip?". No it isn't someone screwed up making the PCI database for linux.
 

• Step 2. What kernel are you using? if you're using a 2.2.x kernel you would do well do download a newer toshoboe driver from here and install it into your kernel. The same applies for 2.4.x.
  
  As of now (November 21 2001) the situation is:
  

  	2.2.20	2.4.14
  ships with kernel	toshoboe 1.91 (old version before rewrite)	toshoboe 1.91
  Latest	toshoboe 2.12	donauboe 2.14

  
  So you should down load the latest driver for your kernel 2.2.x should get 2.12 and 2.4.x should get 2.14 or later. The name change is incidental.
  
• Step 3, build the kernel and modules and install both.
• Step 4, test the damm thing.
[root@isis /root]# modprobe toshoboe
IrDA (tm) Protocols for Linux-2.2 (Dag Brattli)
ToshOboe: Found 701 chip at 0xffe0 irq 11
toshoboe: setting baud to 9600
toshoboe: setting baud to 9600
toshoboe: setting baud to 9600
toshoboe: setting baud to 9600
toshoboe: setting baud to 9600
toshoboe: setting baud to 9600
toshoboe: setting baud to 115200
toshoboe: setting baud to 9600
toshoboe: setting baud to 9600
toshoboe: setting baud to 1152000
toshoboe: Restarted tx
toshoboe: setting baud to 9600
toshoboe: setting baud to 9600
toshoboe: setting baud to 4000000
toshoboe: Restarted tx
toshoboe: setting baud to 9600
toshoboe: setting baud to 115200
toshoboe: setting baud to 115200
toshoboe: Self test passed ok
IrDA: Registered device irda0
toshoboe: Using multiple tasks, version $Id: toshoboe.c,v 2.12 2000/06/10 17:09:47 root Exp $
[root@isis /root]#


If you use X or some other deviant graphical interface you may have to type "dmesg" to get the output above. If you did find a chip but you didn't pass the self test mail me and I'll be genuinely interested. [NB: Older drivers don't do self tests.]

Now if you are 99% of people you want to get this to work with your mobile phone. If you are 98% of people you are porbably also confused at this point. I get more email about this than
any other thing:

 
IrDA hardware is represented by a network device under linux the first interface is called irda0 and so on. Some IrDA hardware attaches to the serial port, not the toshoboe however. The serial port is not a network device and to allow IrDA interfaces on the serial port to have a network device a little program is run called irattach which binds the serial port on which the IrDA interface is to a network device like irda0. [This is very similar to the way that ppp connects a network interface to the serial port in order to send network packets over a modem]

The procedure above has absolutely nothing to do with IrDA serial ports, IrCOMM or making your mobile phone go. Once you have irda0 up and running, the kernel emulates a serial port (called /dev/ircomm0) operations on /dev/ircomm0 are turned into IrDA network packets and sent out over the IrDA interface.

Since the toshoboe chip is not connected to a serial port you should not be running irattach on anything least of all /dev/ircomm0 (which would mean, dear kernel in order to send an IrDA packet please send data to the emulated serial port. To send data from the emulated serial port please send it as an IrDA packet.)


All you need to do after doing modprobe toshoboe is the following:

 
[root@isis /root]# ifconfig irda0 up
[root@isis /root]# insmod ircomm
[root@isis /root]# insmod ircomm-tty
[root@isis /root]# echo -n 1 > /proc/sys/net/irda/discovery


If you don't have ircomm-tty but you do have ircomm_tty replace your kernel it's too old, and you don't want to try the old version.

To see your phone put it in range and switch on ir on the phone. Then do
 

[root@isis /root]# cat /proc/net/irda/discovery
 
And your phone should be listed, if it isn't try moving closer or further away.
To use it just open /dev/ircomm0 in your favourite terminal emulator program.
[Some phones can't handle flow control so you probably want to turn hardware flow control off, you don't need any flow control as it's handled by the IrDA emulation layer]

If you don't have /dev/ircomm0 make it with

 
[root@isis /root]# mknod /dev/ircomm0 c 161 0
 
Happy fun running up your phone bill...