One common problem many people encounter is when trying to access their FireWire cameras. The problem is that Flumotion is not able to detect your FireWire device because the device creation for FireWire does not work on many current distributions. Check if you have a /dev/raw1394 device. If not create, it by using this command:

[root@server root]# mknod -m 666 /dev/raw1394 c 171 0

A problem you might encounter after Flumotion has been stopped in an uncontrolled way, for instance due to a software crash, server failure, or you killing the Flumotion processes, is that the Flumotion workerrefuses to start. A common reason for this is that the pid file of the old process is still present. You need to manually remove it before you are allowed to restart the Flumotion worker. You can find the pid files in /var/run/flumotion. Make sure all Flumotion processes are stopped/removed before deleting the pid files manually.

Some udev based distributions like Fedora Core do not properly detect and create the needed device for Firewire cameras to work. This issue have been reported upstream and is being fixed. While waiting for the fix to be introduced you can solve it by running this command as root.

mknod -m 666 /dev/raw1394 c 171 0
    

Some distributions, like Fedora Core, do not have permissions set up to allow Flumotion, when run under a separate user, to have read and write access to the needed devices like /dev/dsp*, /dev/mixer*, /dev/video* and so on. You can change this by running chmod commands as root. For example:

chmod +rw /dev/dsp*