I'd like to make my old tower that is running Slackware 12 with kernel 2.6.23.12 into a digital answering machine with my external Zoom dualmode 56k 2949L Voice modem. I followed software that was included in a book I bought called Linux Toys and provided these on cd:

ltdrconfig-1.1-0.noarch.rpm
mgetty-vocp-1.1.30-3.i386.rpm
normalize-0.7.6-0.i386.rpm
perl-Audio-DSP-0.02b-8.i386.rpm
perl-CGI.pm-2.97-8.i386.rpm
perl-Crypt-Blowfish-2.09-8.i386.rpm
perl-Crypt-CBC-2.08-8.i386.rpm
perl-Modem-Vgetty-0.04-8.noarch.rpm
perl-Tie-Watch-1.1-8.i386.rpm
perl-Tk-800.024-8.i386.rpm
perl-Tk-JPEG-2.014-8.i386.rpm
perl-VOCP-0.9.3-8.noarch.rpm
perl-XML-Mini-1.2.8-8.i386.rpm
vocp-0.9.3-0.i386.rpm

There's a tool in Slackware (rpm2tgz) that converted these rpm to tgz files so that I could install them. All went well but I cannot get my modem detected from the modem library in mgetty. It works fine with minicom on /dev/ttyS0 (I made a symlink to /dev/modem) and minicom has verified that it is a Zoom voice modem. Is there some way that I can get mgetty or some other phone software to recognize my Zoom modem?

EDIT: This software is based on this:

www.vocpsystem.com

Not sure about the modem but you can try turning up the log level to try and determine the issue:

/var/log/mgetty.log.ttyS0 should be the location and you can use something like "-x 5"

Also wanted to point out that most of those RPM's look like CPAN modules for the Perl packages, you could have probably used Perl to install those modules instead of using rpm2tgz.

Be prepared that Digital Answering Machine are not well supported in the Linux world. and don't try to run before you can walk -- try setup fax first. FYI, I was able to make my Voice modem works for fax but not voice.