Hi guys,

I have been trying for days now to get my little winmodem to work in Fedora Core 5. I know it works under linux 'cause I had it working in Suse 10. I switched distro because YaST was painfully slow on this little 466Celeron. (BTW, after a few tweaks I was suprised how fast linux ran on this machine)

I have been to linmodems.org, and a couple other sites that talked about it. I tried just about everything, even installed linuxants drivers (they are for Conexant modems), eventhough my modem is a Agere/Lucent chipset.

I tried the scanModem, and then trying to compile a driver for it. One thing is for sure, compiling something can be a real pain in the butt.... I mean, just when you fixed one thing, another breaks. Grrr....

Anyways, why am I posting? Not sure, since I searched this forum too for some answeres, and all I saw was something like "move on to broadband".

I wished we could give these hardware vendors more than a "nudge" to remind them of the linux community. Or maybe someone could write something like ndiswrapper for winmodems.

I guess I ranted enough. If you have suggestions, please write back. I'd love to fix this. I know it could work, since it worked in SuSE 10.

If you feel like ranting too, please feel free to add to this thread. Maybe we could collect it and send it over to them modem makers.....

Well they call them winmodems for a reason. They really only work with windoze. Best bet, get you a external serial modem and be done with it. They are well worth it. They plain work better.

...or you can join the 21st century and get broadband.

Congratulations on your awesomely useless comment. I hope that made you feel good or something because you must need it.

http://linmodems.technion.ac.il/

Is that what you're trying to use? A trick I've found is if installing something seems to difficult, take a look at how different distrobutions package it. From what I've found by looking around it seems that something like this should work:
Then run depmod, see how that goes.

You know, I think I am just plain stupid... let me explain:

I was thinking the same thing. "Maybe use the external 56K US Robotics Sporster. It's a great little unit." So off I go and hook it up to the parallel port and tried KPPP to look for the modem. Sure enough, couldn't find it.

"Oh, right... permissions"

So I set the permissions for ttyPAR0 (or something like that)... I even made a symbolic link (a big step for me! ) for it to /dev/modem.

Again, couldn't find it. I tried all the other ports I thought may be the parallel port. Then I though "Maybe the BIOS disabled the P. Port"... so I got a serial cable to the serial port (I got a LOT of computer junk laying around)...

Again, nothing... nothing on ttyS0 -> S4 .... grrrrr... and I googled and googled to find something out there.

And sorry to say, in Windows, I just plugged it in and it was detected. (OOPS... I said the "W" word.... ) Seriously, I am not trying to get into a debate about Windows and Linux. I am still on trying to get Linux working. I don't WANT Windows. What I am saying is, can't we get something going in Linux. Thus this thread ... the rant!

I wished I was up to snuff with Programming in Linux and all, but my programming days go back to Turbo Pascal 7.0 in DOS. Eeek... (Well, there was some C++)

Then again, maybe my first line of reply might be correct ... maybe I am just stupid.

I think I wrote about you in my original post. Something to the notion of plain useless blabber. You see, modems are not just for the internet. I DO have a 6Mbit broadband connection that is serving me well. But for sending faxes, YOU NEED A MODEM.

I don't know why I even bothered replying.

Thanks man,

I will try that next time I install FC5 on another machine. Actually I will try it on the server I have at work. Just now I went and installed Suse 10 on my little box here at home and it installs the drivers for some winmodem right in the install. It's great... detected it and installed everything for you. Now, why can't we have something for other distros?

That brings me to something else. I do like Suse. But right now, I think if you have an older machine, stick with 10.0. YaST is dog slow in 10.1, now that they included some ZEN engine in it (don't ask me about the in's and out's, all I know is that it is based on MONO and it's a resource hog). From what I read on forums is that they have some major bugs in it and, as they are have fixed some already, they working on it. Maybe 10.2 will be better?

I have never seen a modem that was parallel before. I have been messing with them a long time too. You have a link for that thing somewhere? I want to see this one. O_O

Later

Hi dalek,

I actually have about 10 of them right here. 7 are 33.6 and 3 are 56k. All external modems. I only have 3 power supplies for them and a couple cables. But these units were ~$250 new back in the day.

All have a parallel port (25 PIN DB25) or so I think. Or maybe it's a wide serial port????. It is definitely not a DB9 (9 PIN) output on the back of the modem. EDIT: Actually you are right. It is a serial port and only 9 of the 25 PINS get used.

I have one straight parallel to parallel cable and 2 parallel to serial cables. And I tried both to hook up the unit (I even switched the units, just to make sure at least one of them worked.)

As for a link, here it is: http://www1.shopping.com/xPF-_3Com_U...V_90_325689_03


I wonder if one of these would work under linux:
http://www.techfocus.co.uk/usb-paral...ble-p-205.html

dalek,

Another question for you, and yes, this is off topic.

Do you like your Gentoo Linux, and why? And it's fine if it is just a preference thing. I am still exploring the linux horizon.

I love it. Gentoo is harder to install and the new GUI thing doesn't work here. My last install on this machine was about 2 1/2 years ago and it is all up to date and no old cruft laying around either. There are some things to watch out for but once you learn them, it is a breeze. The forums are great too. They have a lot of excellant docs, even though I don't use a lot of them.

The key to a good install, research. You need to know what you plan to install and do with the machine first. Then get you a good set of USE flags and partition your drives like you need. If you want to tweak for speed, research some good LDFLAGS too. Then do the install.

Doing updates is as easy as emerge sync && emerge -uv world about 95% of the time. After the updates are done, update the config files and restart any updated services and you are done. I have used Mandrake before Gentoo, I would still pick Gentoo over Mandrake. Mandrake is easy to install but the updates are a pain and everything is binary when you get it. No tweaking there.

It is really nice and unique for sure. What you have is as close to Linux from Scratch as it can get I think. It is what they planned when they wrote the code since it is source based.

Install something easy like Mandrake and you can install Gentoo from that. I did it that way. I did mine from a Konsole in KDE in Mandrake. Then I moved it to another drive later on. Knoppix will work to I have heard.

Hope that helps.

Oh please you guys have some cheese with that wine. Ranting is not the best way to get anything. Painful memories of some old gash.

No company is going to bother much on providing linux support for slow speed modems. External serial modems work as you well know.

If you want to fax documents there are services that allow this via the internet. In fact I know my company uses one such service (cant remember the name). You may have to pay a small monthly fee, but if you think about it you can save on paper and ink. Save some trees... and the whales...save yourself