I recently installed Mandrake 8.2 on my new Dell Inspiron 8200. While I was able to get the onboard WinModem to work (though the driver wasn't the spitting image of stability), I needed a call-waiting modem to use with the thing. Hence, I borrowed my external serial Actiontec Call Waiting Modem from my other box, which runs Mandrake 8.1 at the moment, and plugged it into my laptop's handy legacy serial port.

At first, the modem worked fine, or at least it is my perception that it did. However, at some point the speed of my internet connections dropped dramatically. Using Windows XP on the same computer, as well as Linux and the same modem on my other computer, I was able to achieve normal 56k connection speeds; however, with linux on the Inspiron I could only get data in what appeared to be periodical bursts. If the GkRellm ppp0 throughput monitor is a fair soothsayer, I appear to alternate in 10 to 15 second intervals between high throughput and low/zero throughput.

I am near certain that this is not a flow control issue because I am using Mandrake's default modem configurations on both machines, and this modem is "normal" as hardware modems go.

What it does seem like, and what was the first thing to cross my mind, is an irq conflict. That said, /proc/interrupts appears to be of the opinion that nothing else is trying to share an interrupt with this serial port. Originally the port was ttyS0/COM1 on IRQ 9; I changed that in the BIOS and with setserial to ttyS1/COM2 on IRQ 4, and have also putzed around with enabling/disabling the machine's other serial port through the BIOS (which is the infared port, currently not in use)... but to no avail.

One thing that stands out as somewhat odd, though, is that if this is in fact an interrupt request conflict, I have no unusual latency between requesting a connection and getting it; rather, my only problem is connections being dropped during long downloads or while loading large web pages. So I'm out of fresh ideas... any experience here with similar problems?

Anyhow, any help appreciated, as are any thoughtful shots in the air =). As a side note, besides this issue I have managed to get all of the Inspiron's hardware functional under Linux (volume buttons, fan control, apm, etc..), so if I can offer any pointers there, feel free to send me an email at gail@mail.portland.co.uk and I'll be happy to write a post detailing how.

All right, thanks in advance...

-Mark

Sorry, guys... meant to post this under the "Hardware" section. Hopefully the subject is close enough that nobody will notice =).

-Mark

Perhaps this post fits best into the "Networking" category after all.

After I made my last post I came to realize that this problem only occurs while I am running Garnome. I subsequently made several successful downloads of large files from under KDE, icewm, and so on. So it wasn't a hardware configuration problem after all.

Now the question is: Why is Garnome behaving in such a manner? I have a couple of theories... for one thing, the fact that it is installed under /opt/garnome and owned by another user (but not root) may have something to do with it. Oddly, this behavior affects all applications that connect to the internet, not only Gnome-specific ones.

So, does anybody out there happen to know what features or settings of Garnome Preview 8 / Gnome 2.0.0 might be causing these symptoms?

Thanks,
-Mark