Getting Started

Red Hat 8.0 comes with a 2.4.18-14 kernel which recognizes most FireWire cards. I tested it on the PCI card we bought (Sitecom) and on different laptops (Dell X200 and a IBM Thinkpad T32)

ohci1394: $Revision: 1.101 $ Ben Collins 
PCI: Found IRQ 11 for device 00:03.0
ohci1394_0: OHCI-1394 1.0 (PCI): IRQ=[11]  MMIO=[40900000-40900800]  Max Packet=[2048]

If your kernel does not support IEEE1394 yet , you can choose to use a more recent version of precompiled kernels from your distribution, or build one your own.

There is some excellent documentation on how to build your own FireWire capable kernel on http://www.linux1394.org/start_install.html.

The RedHat installation I did was quite complete, you might want to check if you have everything installed you need. Mainly the devel packages from different libraries you need.