No, please! Don't run away!
I have both a PCI winmodem (Turbocomm, Lucent Mars) and an ISA winmodem (GVC, Lucent Luna) and I can't get either of them to work in Mandrake 8.1.
When I had 7.1 installed I got the driver RPM from heby.de and installed it and it worked without a glitch, but now I'm using (trying to anyway) 8.1 and it won't work. First I installed the driver for my kernel version just like in 7.1 but it didn't work, then I tried installing the kernel headers and kernel sources to compile the regular driver, no problems with the install but the modem doesn't work. The PPP dialer is looking for dev/modem which doesn't exist (there's an lt_modem.o though).
I know this isn't very clear, but why isn't there a dev/modem ? I'm going to set "PnP OS Installed" to "No" in the BIOS, but I don't think that's the problem because my PCI modem won't work either.
Ask what you need to know and maybe you can get an idea of what I've got here.
(BTW, I'm using the ISA modem because it's faster then the PCI one, it's older and not as cheap)