I've been looking around for a few days on the net and I have found some information regarding winmodems and linux. I have Slack 8.0 running with the latest KDE and I have the intent of getting on the internet. Well, problem is, I have a winmodem, not a REAL modem. As far as I know, and I don't know much about Linux, this is my second week or so working with it, Slackware doesn't have embedded RPM handling support, so I can't just install the drivers I found (ltmodem-6.00b14.tar.gz), I have to compile them into the kernel. So, I download the Linux 2.2.19 kernel (same as what was in my slack install, linux-2.2.19.tar.bz2) I try to open it with tar, and it says
"tar: hmm, doesn't look like a tar archive
tar: skipping to next file header
tar: only read 7032 bytes from archive
tar: error is not recoverable: exiting now "
So, I'm kinda at a loss here...I don't have the $$ to buy a modem at this time, so I would like to get my 56k up and running on Linux because I would like to gradually phase out Windows 98 and run just Linux and the Xserver. Any ideas???

One other question:
Will my old Sound Blaster 16 work in Linux (In Win98 it works 100x better than the integrated sound on my motherboard)?

firstly you need to do this to decompress the file

bunzip2 filename.tar.bz2

this should leave you with a file called filename.tar

then simply do

tar -xvf filename.tar

then you should be able to enter the directory.

ARGH! the file won't decompress, and I've tried over a bizilion ways... is there anyway I can get RPM support in slack? That would require one hell of alot less monkeying around with sources and compiling...