i use that speedtouch 330 usb from Thomson on slack10. w/ the open drivers from SourceForge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/speedtouch/)

But whenever i issue the speedtouch-start command which initializes the modem (synchronizing it etc) it always takes a long time for the light to blink, to connect etc...

I know that this is a necessary process every time the computer is initialized but I noticed that in windows this happens while the computer is still starting and it doesn't block the computer, in other words, the rest of the initialization can still continue while the modem is busy blinking its lights.

So i was wondering if there's a way to speed up this initialization process by maybe issuing the command w/ a & at the end or something. Or using some other method to make it run on the background as one of the first things during initialization.

Does anyone know how if this is possible?

Thanks a lot!

Yes it's possible if you use the kernel space driver. Duncan Sands and David Woodhouse have improved the code in the 2.6.10 kernel so the kernel driver can now load the firmware without the help of modem_run from the package you mention. You need to prepare the firmware. Untar the speedtouch tarball you linked to, cd into speedtouch-1.3.1/src and then issue the command

gcc -o firmware firmware.c -DSTANDALONE_EXTRACTER

that will create a binary file called firmware. You can then use that to split whatever copy of the firmware you use into two parts. Copy it somewhere in a folder with the firmware, for example, mgmt.o then issue the command

./firmware mgmt.o

That will split mgmt.o into boot.bin and firmware.bin. You need to rename boot.bin speedtch-1.bin and rename firmware.bin speedtch-2.bin . Then you need to copy them to the folder that hotplug looks for firmware. This is defined in /etc/hotplug/firmware.agent . On my slackware install it's

# directory of the firmware files
FIRMWARE_DIR=/usr/lib/hotplug/firmware

but on lfs it's

# directory of the firmware files
FIRMWARE_DIR=/lib/firmware

Copy those two binary files in there. Compile a 2.6.10-rc3 kernel and make sure you enable hotplug firmware loading,
CONFIG_FW_LOADER=y
Then it should load the firmware on boot (works for me). Then you just need to run pppd to connect to your ISP.
The big difference is that hotplug hands the firmware to the kernel but it doesn't keep the focus (or whatever it's called). The boot process Keeps going and by the time gnome has loaded and drawn the desktop I'm online.
I've just done a test against the stopwatch and it was a dead heat. From the grub screen to my homepage rendered in Firefox took 45 seconds in both Windows XP and Linux From Scratch.