Agilent Technologies DP111 - Manual (Page 15)

User Manual: Agilent Acqiris 8-bit Digitizers Page 15 of 59
modules (such as this one). As such, automatic creation of the /dev/acqrsPCI node has to be done manually in the
/etc/rc.local file (see Creating the device driver node in 2.3.4 Loading the kernel module).
2.3.4. Loading the kernel module
Once the device driver is installed into its kernel module directory, it has to be loaded into the kernel. First update the
kernel modules dependencies:
/sbin/depmod -a
Then load the kernel module:
/sbin/modprobe -v acqrsPCI
You can add the command above to your /etc/rc.local file. It is run at system startup and will load the
acqrsPCI kernel module automatically when your computer is restarted.
You can check that the device driver is loaded properly with lsmod.
/sbin/lsmod | grep acqrsPCI
If lsmod does not report a module named acqrsPCI, then the kernel module is not loaded into the kernel. Check any
error messages that may have been issued by the commands you have run, and contact Agilent Acqiris technical
support.
2.3.5. Creating the device driver node
Check that a device node has been created.
ls -l /dev/acqrsPCI
If the device node /dev/acqrsPCI is present on your system, the Acqiris Software is ready to be used. Otherwise,
continue reading this section.
For systems using udev (the dynamic /dev/ hierarchy) or running kernels above 2.6.17, the device driver node may
not be created automatically. You can do it with mknod by running the following command:
/sbin/mknod -m 666 /dev/acqrsPCI c 124 0
You can check that the device node has been created with ls:
ls -l /dev/acqrsPCI
You can add the mknod command to your /etc/rc.local file. It is run at system startup and will create the
/dev/acqrsPCI device node automatically when your computer is restarted.
Note that the permissions that are set in this example (-m 666) give access to the Acqiris instruments to all users.
This may not be what you expect and these permissions can be adjusted to fit your requirements. The base rule is
that any user that wants to use the Acqiris instruments have to get read and write access to /dev/acqrsPCI.
2.3.6. Firmware files and Environment variables
If you intend to use Averagers, Analyzers, Time to Digital converters, or 12-bit digitizers you must install the
Firmware .bit files. You can either copy them from the Firmware directory of the CD-ROM or download them from
our WEB site. They should be placed in the Firmware subdirectory of AcqirisLinux. In the case of the CD-ROM, this
can be done by continuing the above command sequence with the following:
cp /mnt/CDRom/Firmware/*.bit Firmware/
If you need to keep multiple versions of the Firmware, please continue reading this section.
Automatic loading of the firmware needed by some modules relies on the environment variable AcqirisDxDir
pointing to the directory containing the file AqDrv4.ini which in turn points to the directory containing the Firmware
.bit files. Therefore, assuming that your Firmware is in /usr/local/AcqirisLinux/Firmware and that AqDrv4.ini is
in /usr/local/AcqirisLinux/demo then you must edit AqDrv4.ini so that it contains the line
fpgaPath=/usr/local/AcqirisLinux/Firmware
Then, if your shell is csh or tcsh modify the .login file to contain the line