[Cooker] minicom and ppp broken for pcmcia modems

[Steven J Mackenzie]

This is a bug I spotted after installing MD8.2 on an old laptop. (Yes, I have seen the hotplug errata :)  The same version of minicom and ppp are in cooker still, I think.   My laptop (HP Omnibook CS5500) has PCMCIA bridge Cirrus Logic CL6729 (rev e2). The PCMCIA modem card is a Pace NB56 56K card. I also have a Prolink 1436C 33.6K card, which behaves the same way. (These are both full hardware modems and work fine with kppp.)   My PCMCIA net card works fine, and the modems both work with kppp (ie, the hardware is fine!). I have configured my modem and ppp scripts from a shell using netconf.   My problem is that neither minicom, nor the ifup/usernetctl command line tools can communicate with the modem. As root, minicom starts, but the modem does not reply "OK" to the initialisation string, or to "AT".   ifup leaves this message in the logs: May 13 08:47:09 waterloo ifup-ppp: pppd started for ppp0 on /dev/modem at 115200 May 13 08:47:09 waterloo pppd[2375]: pppd 2.4.1 started by root, uid 0 May 13 08:47:11 waterloo pppd[2375]: Connect script failed May 13 08:47:12 waterloo pppd[2375]: Exit. Note that the script has "failed" before an attempt to dial a number.   If I create and install a new minicom RPM (rpm -ba minicom.spec) from the SRPM, minicom is still broken. If I just extract the raw minicom source from the SRPM and compile that (./configure, make), then then minicom works fine -- the Mandrake rpm build script is doing something that stops minicom from communicating with my PCMCIA modem. What would I need to recompile to get ifup working (I *need* this ...)? I tried ppp, but it didn't make any difference.   Steven