i've looked all over and I can't seem to find a driver for my modem.

its a PCTel modem and I think its considered a win modem so I was wondering if anyone knew where I could find a way to make it work on mandrake....

I told mandrake to query to modem but it won't recognize it.

Did you look here?

http://www.medres.ch/~jstifter/pctel/

I got the driver on my windows desktop-- it shows up as a winzip file. Then I put it on a floppy and put it in my linux machine but linux says theres a file but it can't show it. the file is a .tar file. Do I need some kind of unzip utility for mandrake?

From the command line, if its just a tar file, nicknamed tarballs:

tar xvf nameoffile.tar

If its a compressed tarball, nicknamed g'zipped tarballs, usually much more often the case:

tar xvzf namoffile.tar.gz

Then you're probably going to have to run the configure script within it and compile the source... probably. The INSTALL file or the README in there should get you sorted.

Luck,

Finegan

my chipset doesn't seem to be supprted by this driver -- the one BittaBrutha mentioned -- the chipset says- "GFXcel" I think SiS makes it--- same as an SiS 630E. I'm not sure where to go. driver says it supports sis but I try to configure it for an sis but it trys to do it for an "I810" I'm confused ---hopefully its because i'm a newbie---

Hardware can be a headache, and especially modems, in that when it comes down to cards, ethernet, sound, blah blah blah , there is a TON of rebranding going on. The only thing that matters is what chipset is actually in the modem, then search around for drivers for that. The best way to find this out is, from a command line:

lspci -vv

and use the information that seems model specific. The 'v's are there to make it kick more verbose output, so you'll have info about cache latency times and yadyayda. Honestly, getting a soft modem to work is always a trial, so much so that very few Linux geeks ever actually bother (most of them have broadband anyway).

Luck,

Finegan