Sorry but I’m a total noobie when it comes to Linux - I got my FW card and stuck it in the PCMCIA slot. How do I “Make Linux see it” or even see if it’s in the right place? I’ve been over at ffado but I’m afraid I don’t understand a word of what’s going on. If someone has a link to a place where the whole concept is presented somewhat easier to grasp, please! I finished what I hope was the last 2.8 project on the Mac yesterday …
use google or ask on the forums of the distro you use.
but basicaly it might involve downloading source code and compiing it.
Tell me what card this is exactly, along with the output of lspci and lspci -n. I’ll see if I can help. No promises. 
If your firewire adaptor if detected will appear as device /dev/fw0. Do you have the ffado software installed? If so run the command ffado-diag which, if things are working, will print a lot of output including information about your FireWire Host Controller. If you do not have ffado installed you need to install the packages from your distro or compile it yourself. If you use AVLinux, kxstudio or dreamstudio they come with ffado already installed. If you main interest is music I’d advise you to use one of these distros because they are pre-configured with lots of audio enhancements and recent music software which will save you a lot of time and effort reproducing on a non-music oriented distro. For the best support for ffado join the ffado users email list: http://www.ffado.org/?q=contact
I just ran ffado-diag just to see what it says, and I thought it was interesting that it said
Preempt (low latency)… False
when in fact my kernel is configured to be fully-preemptible.
Hi thanks, it’s all working now - there were some things that needed to be set in jack, and I found an older posting in I think Linuxmusicians that gave me the ffado tricks. Stupidest thing that cost me hours yesterday was I don’t know where the “pipe” symbol is on my keyboard, the vertical line that is no capital i and no lower case L … then one last try before bed yesterday and it all worked, Patchbay showed me 26 ins and outs - I thought I had to have RealTime checked but it needed to be unchecked. Some other stuff too but I have been recording today. Yes I have AVLinux, it was suggested to me in the Mac forum of this site and I’m very happy so far! It’s definitely growing on me …