yeah, I know what chipset I have so I put hal=sis and you're right it is an amr modem. I've been so busy today that I haven't had much time to play about with it. I've installed Madrake 9 on my old pc - which, incidently, has a Lucent winmodem in it (lol) and I'm going to practice on that one.
I still intend to finish htis tho'. I'll check out the How-To link now thanks, before I crash out. Till tomorrow then....

When I try the link I get the old 'can't locate to remote server' error, I'll check it in Google. cheers

I found the 'HowTo' and it's definitely well written and easy to follow. I'm gonna work through it tonite after work. There are a few things there which I'm sure are gonna help - the country code for one, I've a feeling that it isn't set to UK so I'll try that first and the sound issue is a definite possibility.
Well thanks again and I'll get back and let you know how things go - if this damn kitten stops walking over my keyboard long enough, lol

Akabeavis you are THE MAN. Finally I'm up n running. Worked my way thru the HowTo and was just about to throw in the towel when I decided to try disabling the onboard sound to see if that helped. Well I dunno if it's that but here I am in a Konqueror browser. Thanks for the encouragement and great advice, I've learnt a lot this past week and it's been damn interesting. Now all I gotto do is learn the Gimp in place of Photoshop, lol.
Well I'm off to surf so I'll speak to you later - thanks again man

I'll drink to that...

Good for you, you have done quite well, as a matter of fact, you're way ahead of where I was after my first linux install. The other thing in that howto that caught my eye was the pnp bios setting stuff, perhaps if you disable it, you can have both sound and modem.

yeah I saw that too, I'll try it out. Also, it appears that I have to reload the pctel/ptserial each time I want to connect [with insmod -f] - any ideas why and is there a workround I can use?

well - one final thing on this subject I hope. Everything is fine now apart from the fact that before I can log on to the net I have to reload pctel and ptserial with 'insmod -f ...' -[ if I run lsmod before this there's no sign of them ]
Is there a script, or a file I can reconfigure which will do this automatically for me when I boot in mdk 9.1? I'm sure I saw one somewhere but it was beyond my comprehension at the time - I'm ready to have a crack at it now, lol.
catch u later, thanks

There are at least a few ways to accomplish this. My recommendation would be that it is a good time to try your hand at bash scripting. I'm envisioning a script that first unloads the sound modules, then loads the modem modules, runs kppp, and when you exit kppp it unloads the modem modules and reloads the sound modules. You could then place a link to this script on your desktop or on the "kicker" (button bar at the bottom of the screen in kde) and name it appropriately as well as choose an appropriate icon for it.

here is a script I'm currently using when I dialup my laptop: (which isn't often since I'm on cable ) comments that are ignored by bash begin with a "#" character.

#!/bin/bash
#cardctl eject 0 --> this used to be needed when the pcmcia #used the same int as the modem.
modprobe mwave
mwavem & # the mwave 'manager'
/usr/bin/kppp
killall mwavem
modprobe -r mwave


Alternately, you could add the same commands to your /etc/rc.d/rc.local file and have them run every boot, but this would deprive you of your sound (at least as things stand now). I assume your sound works when you're not trying to use the modem?

Additionally, you can do a "modinfo" on both the sound and modem modules and see what options are available at load time, perhaps things like irq and io address can be changed. You would load these modules with params only *after* you see if your bios allows you to clean up what looks like an irq conflict.

I'll have a go - I'm in my element right now [it's gonna keep me occupied 'til the soccer season starts up in August,lol]
My sound was working but I think I'll enable it again before trying anything else because I altered a couple of bios settings so it may be ok.
I've even managed to compile a couple of progs and instal them - it's pretty straightforward really - he says after a week of head scratching -
I'll get back tomorrow and let you know how things went, c'ya then m8

Try Mandrake Control Center->HardDrake. Is your modem listed there? If so, click on it and click the 'Run config tool' button. You could also try clicking on the 'Options' button and setting 'Autodetect modems' to On (ticked).

You could also try using LinuxConf, even if it is only another way of skinning the cat.

I don't have a modem, so I can't give more specific advice, but this might give you a bit more to work with.

thanks but I've already tried that - the modem is listed but there are no details about it and no 'run config- button available as a result.

I have a web page on setting up the pctel modem with using OSS drivers The OSS drivers cost $35 US and unless you are using a laptop the money would be better spent on a new modem.

Although I got this working in Mandrake 9.0, I had trouble with arts in KDE with MDK 9.1. No matter what I did to disable ALSA, arts kept installing the sound modules everytime KDE started. I suspect Gnome would be easier to use. I also tried to remove ALSA but It had a huge number of dependencies including KDE.

If you need to use the pctel modem + sound you can either buy the OSS drivers ($35) and reinstall mdk 9.1 without ALSA, + removing the kernel sound modules with a kernel recompile or follow my web page directions for an older version of mandrake or consider installing a different distro that does not use alsa (redhat 9 etc)

My best advice is to buy a new modem, they are cheaper than the OSS drivers You are having all this trouble because pctel does not support linux and what driver is available is made by volunteers. I think that we vote with our money and if you want to encourge linux we should support vendors that support linux.

Lucent ltmodems and conexant HCF modems (both available for around $10 us at www.knowledgemicro.com) work very well thanks to vendor support. They do not conflict with anything I know of. There are mandrake 9.1 specific rpms available for both modems. The lucent ltmodems are the easiest (The cheap Walmart computers that come with linux all use a cheap lucent chipset based ltmodem).

ECS A900 with Mandrake 9.0

By the way, I am running Slackware 8.1 now on the A900 with KDE 3.1.2, Mozilla 1.3.1, XFree 4.3.0 and openoffice 1.3.0.1 I decided to stay with a gcc 2.95 based system just because of the pctel modem. I ran into this link googling for a way to autoload the oss drivers in Slackware.

thanks for the advice but I have actually managed to configure the PCTel 0-9.6 driver and got it working now - altho' I have to use insmod -f to achieve it. I'm getting a new mo'board in a couple of weeks so I'll most likely get a 'proper' modem (and broadband if I can convince the wife, lol)
Thanks again