macintosh modems with linux?
 

I've pretty much tried different search terms and whats-not to find anything on the web but even old sites for linux on macs never mentions anything about modems so here is the big question....

are external modems (whether geoport type or not) even useable under linux at all?

I think that I recall the mac port being a limited version of rs422 but thats all I know about in relative to this question atm

External modems work just fine...the problem these days is finding a computer that has a serial port on it. :)

USB to serial converters work just fine...in minicom (or whatever dialer you want, even a PPP dialer), modify the device to be /dev/ttyUSBx (where X is something, like 0, 1....), since the /dev/modem device won't be present. Things like wvdialconf will frequently poll the serial-capable devices, and find it for you.

Also watch the pinouts. Apple used a non-standard pinout (surprise surprise) on their serial ports. I used to have to wire up adapters to make them work on equipment with standard ports.

Many if not msot new motherboards have serial port (COM) headers if not a integral port. Just need to pick up the right backplate assembly.

TB0ne that answer wasn't quite relative because pretty much all powermacs had onboard serial one way or another. just letting you know ;)
at least I guess I could check the documentations for these two dialers you mentioned and see if theres any helpful tidbits

NyteOwl I know what you mean about that, at least its not hard to make a macserial-to-rs232 cable for use with pc biased serial devices!

whether that helps you two and/or anyone else this is the kind of modem I was looking to use with the serial port providing the serial port itself is useable under linux which is the original question I was asking about :-)
http://allthingsd.com/files/2011/11/...56-380x285.png
(and yes thats a mac serial cable stuck with it)

Well, you didn't mention what kind of Mac you were using in your first post, so no one could know. And sorry the answer wasn't relative to your question....thought telling you about USB to serial devices, dialers, and other things Linux/modem related DID somehow relate to a question about external serial modems....

had to recheck and couldn't find one mac that didn't have serial. but anyhow back to the actual topic, I found a few archived documents on wvdial with powermacs so I think that pretty much solves this for the time being

Great...not everyone uses Macs. Again, sorry to have tried to help...won't happen again.