I'm aware that this problem has been posted many times before, but I've been unable to get any help from them, and yes i am a newbie

I'm running fedora core 1, but also winXP (which of course gives me no modem grief). It's an internal generic modem and on COM3.
I am aware that this corresponds to ttyS2, and have spent ages messing around with the standard GUI modem config util, and tried setting things up right with setserial. I've been using minicom and listening to my telephone preying it while start dialing, but no luck.

as far as i'm aware the modem is not detected at startup and I can't find any mention of it in the output from dmesg et cetera.

I would greatly appreciate any help and just tell me if you need any more info.

Try to ID the modem chipset. It sounds like a winmodem problem, but there is still hope if you can figgure out (maybe on XP) what the chipset is, then look at winmodems.org for a solution...

i suppose you mean linmodems.org?

but still, i have no idea how to ID the modem chipset, please help

okay, so i'm pretty sure my modem is a software modem because XP calls it a generic softK56blah. but I'm not too sure how determine the manufacturer or to find out if it can be a linmodem. any ideas?

try taking the modem out of your pc and seeing if there is any id on the chip or tell-tale codes that u can note on it and do a google search to see if u can get anymore info. somewhere on it there has to be a link to the manufacturer and type.