I know that support for PCI modems is not anywhere near what it could be because the driver specifications for PCI modems are often proprietary and not commonly shared.

That said, have any of you actually had good results using any brand or model of PCI-based modems with any Linux distros?

I know that some people are beginning to have some success with LTmodem (Lintel winmodems). How about PCI? Are any of them catching up? I know that the safest route to take is to select an external, hardware only serial modem, but I'm interested to know if anyone has actually had positive experiences with using any PCI modems with Linux.

I do regularly examine the various vendor and Linux Documentation Project Web pages about such matters; I'm not looking for Web page references, I'm looking for positive experiences, if anyone has had any (yet). Hopefully, this will be an area of big hardware support improvement in the year ahead of us.

Let me know if you know of any interesting and positive findings, especially if you've had personal experience with them, OK?

Thanks!

I have a US Robotics Performance Pro PCI modem and it works well although it is a bit tricky to get set up. They were good enough to give instructions on how to install in linux.

mine is a US Robotics 56K Fax - only wvdial works with it.

I use a Sniper Fast Ethernet Adapter as my NIC, which uses the Realtek 8139too network driver, and I connect it to a broadband network, so I don't have to deal with this issue myself, but I support some people who have home PCs that frequently come with PCI modems.

If you've had success with the US Robotics Pro PCI modem and you have, or can retrieve, the details needed to set it up, that'd sure be nice to have. I intend to pass that information on to some brand new Linux users and I want to make their Linux experience as positive as I can.

Would you assist me some more and dig out the tricks to set up this modem?

Thanks much!

The PCI LTWinModem drivers work pretty good with all distros that I've used, such as Slackware 8.0, Debian 3.0 and lately I'm using RootLinux 1.3 and the modem works fine with the latest drivers.

A Zoom winmodem based on the Lucent chipset works pretty well under Red Hat 7.1

I'm using an ActionTec V.90/V.92 56K Internal PCI Call Waiting Modem that works very well. I have yet to get the call waiting to work properly - just kicks me off line when a call comes in instead of giving me the option to answer or not but otherwise configured easily and works well under SuSE 8.0.

I have a PCI PCTel HSP MicroModem 56. Works great, both with drivers for 2.2 series kernels and 2.4.

Intel HaM 56k modem. Proprietry modules mean I have to taint the kernel to load them, which kinda sucks - but they do what they're supposed to: get me online.

conexant rocks.

conexant rocks.

"get a hardware modem" that's basically what everyone means when they say get an external modem because all external modems are hardware modems. With internal modems you can either get lucky and find one that does all the "modem stuff" in hardware on the card or get sorta lucky and get one that has the software for linux. Some modems are easy like the US Robotics Performance Pro PCI mentioned here because in the case of USR if it doesn't say winmodem it's probably a hardware modem and the only trick is getting it recognized in linux. I have an old ISA (I belive the PCI version is a software modem) Creative Modem Blaster 56 that is a hardware modem, with jumpers even, so once it's jumpered as com1 I just access /dev/ttyS0 and I'm good to go.

With other modems you can look for things like DOS support which doesn't sound linux friendly but usually means it works without needing software to do "modem stuff" so it will probably work in linux. Of course you can also look for linux support which could mean anything from it being a hardware modem to there is software in the linux kernel (ACP MWave is an example though they suck even with the right software) to you can download a binary from their web site and load it as a module to do the software "modem stuff" in linux.

* "modem stuff" means all the functions that REAL "hardware modems" do via chips in the actual modems and cheap "winmodems" or "software modems" leave out and compensate for in software.

The USR Performance Pro is a decent PCI hardware modem that is compatible with Linux.
It is also V.92 + V.44 ready if you can get an ISP that has support for these standards.
All 2.3 and higher Linux Kernels have the drivers included.
In KPPP all I remember having to do was add a "1" to the init string.

Out of the box it had no real problems.