I've seen a couple of posts around asking about this, so here's how I got my green froggy going with 9.3. Needless to say, it does not work out of the box.

The good news is that the end result is much more elegant than it used to be, thanks mainly to some kernel improvements

I based my procedure on http://www.linux-usb.org/SpeedTouch/.../firmware.html

However, I had to make a couple of tweaks along the way:

1. Extracting the firmware
a.
The firmware extractor "configure" script needs to be changed to take account of the new hotplug directory structure:
Change line 3 to:
b.
Make a backup of the 50-firmware.hotplug script, and then change line 23 to:
After you have made the changes, run the configure script, then make, make install. Then restore your original 50-firmware.hotplug script.

2. PPP
According to the instructions, you might be forgiven for thinking you are done. But no...as I said...they don't make it easy. The ppp rpm package(2.4.3) seems to be missing the pppoatm.so plugin.(I have reported this to SUSE). My way round this was to compile the source code myself from DVD 2 and copy pppoatm.so to /usr/lib/pppd/2.4.3/.

You are now done - all that's left is to configure the modem and reboot. I used YAST, but there are of course many ways to skin a cat.

Please excuse the rough and ready approach. Naturally it could be improved, but the first attempt is always a bit of a hack.


L

Thanks for this! Just ordered 9.3 and will be using it!

thanks man, i love you

I've been doing every possible procedure, but nothing worked. I even thought about throwing this ugly stingray out of the window, but now.... damn, i can't describe how happy I am.

I'm gonna try it your way, hope it works.

argh!! it didn't work

could you please explain your second step (PPP) a little bit easier? although I think this was not the problem

Sure.

For whatever reason, my DVD installation did not install the /usr/lib/pppd/2.4.3/pppoatm.so file as part of the ppp package. I think it should, since I checked that the previous version did.

1. Using YAST's "Install and Remove Software" modules , I installed the source code for PPP. (Just click the "Source" checkbox next to the ppp binary package).
This installs the compressed sources to /usr/src/packages/SOURCES/ppp-2.4.3.tar.bz2

2. As root, decompress the ppp-2.4.3.tar.bz2 as follows: tar -xvf ppp-2.4.3.tar.bz2.
This will create a new sub directory called ppp-2.4.3.

3*. Change directory to ppp-2.4.3, and run: ./configure && make.
This will compile the file you need into /usr/src/packages/SOURCES/ppp-2.4.3/pppd/plugins/pppoatm.so

4. To finish off, copy it to /usr/lib/pppd/2.4.3/pppoatm.so.

*You may need to install some other packages to compile the source...."make" and "gcc" for sure.

If this is not the problem, post up the relevent ppp/kernel messages and we'll see what we can do.

Hope this helps, L

Has anyone tried the script from Sourceforge in 9.3?

http://speedtouchconf.sourceforge.net/

From http://speedtouchconf.sourceforge.net/:

"Please report, with details of distro, kernel version (uname -a), distribution (if any), etc. Seems to work up to 2.6.10
Check the speedtouch project for updates"

This seems to agree with what they say on the link I posted before:

"The 2.6.10 kernel (or 2.6.9 on Fedora) has a new feature (respect is due to David Woodhouse and Duncan Sands). It no longer needs modem_run to load the firmware. This is a good thing because it speeds up the boot process. You need to have hotplug installed and enable hotplug firmware loading when you compile the kernel (this seems to be the default for most distros). Then prepare the firmware by splitting it into two parts, speedtch-1.bin and speedtch-2.bin. These files contain programs that are run by the modem (not by your computer). The small file speedtch-1.bin loads the larger file speedtch-2.bin which is the modem's operating system, or something like that."

This suggests that the script will not work with 9.3, since 9.3 uses a 2.6.11 kernel. Also, the pppoatm.so is still required, so there's a problem there too. Finally, I did try to use the old 'single' firmware file method first...and it did not work for me.

However, I suppose if you disabled the the new kernel feature, you may get that script to work.

It would be simple enough to write a little script to automate the procedure I followed....but I'm rather busy at the moment. I might attack it if nobody else has in a week or two.

Yipeeee, I'm online!!!

Thanks, lacerto, you're great!

lacerto
It is extremely useful to have this procedure laid out. I am going to file it away just in case I should ever need it in the future. It's great the things you can learn on these forums simply by reading through other people's problems.

lacerto, which firmware for the modem do you use?

With mgmt.o from speedmgmt.tar.gz downloads are really slow (4kb/s).

I've a revision 0 modem9 (the greeny), so use the one contained speedmgmt.tar.gz tarball.

My download speed is about 450kbps

Deleted by Ed Vaessen

Lacerto - if this works I will think you are a god.

However I may be back shortly with questions (funnily enough I currently have no t'internet at home and everytime I need more help it's a 5 mile cycle to work to decipher the next error message ).

Lacerto - I am at home and if you weren't on the other side of the world (I presume) I could kiss you.

Admittedly, the whole thing isn't automatic yet (it doesn't quite happen at boot t ime or on hotplug) but I do not care because I am on t'internet, at home, for the first time since I upgraded to Suse 9.3.

Thanks again.

So I'm getting picky now but how do I make it all start automatically at boot?

At the moment it will start on hotplug and then I manually modprobe pppoatm and then pppd call speedtch and here I am.

However at boot time we get (from dmesg)
usbcore: registered new driver speedtch
usb 1-1: found stage 1 firmware speedtch-1.bin
usb 1-1: found stage 2 firmware speedtch-2.bin
but we don't get the magic lines
ADSL line is synchronising
DSL line goes up
ADSL line is up (320 Kib/s down | 160 Kib/s up)
(which are from when it does work on hotplug 2 minutes later!) and I can't tell what out of the other crap is the important error message (sorry).

I have a file /etc/init.d/dial which looks like
#!/bin/bash
modprobe pppoatm &&
pppd call speedtch
(I figured I didn't need the modem_run command because I don't need to type that at the console to get it working manually)
and this is also linked via
ln -s ../dial /etc/init.d/rc5.d/S50dial
(though I was under the impression that this is a shutdown thing not a startup?)

The only other thing I can think of is a message from /var/log/messages
modem_run[5927]: Another program/driver is already accessing the modem (interface 1 cannot be claimed)...

Could it just be confusing itself by trying to start ppp when the modem isn't ready? I know it takes at least 5 seconds for the whole DSL synchronising thing to happen.

Any thoughts would be welcome (personally I'm amazed I've got this far!). A final side effect of all this is that my terminal windows no longer know what my hostname is (uname does but $HOSTNAME is empty) - nice