Hi, I just send this mail from my Dell Inspiron 8000 with MiniPCI Ethernet/Modem combi card. Thus, it can work! But please note, that there are two different such combi cards shipped by Dell: One is from 3com and indeed does not allow the modem to work under Linux (but the Ethernet part most probably works); the other is from Actiontec and includes a Lucent WinModem which works perfectly under Linux. You can easily check which type you have by typing 'lspci -v | less' as root (lspci is in the Debian package pciutils). I today installed the drivers for ethernet and winmodem and had no problems at all. You just have to download the ltmodem-5.78e driver from http://walbran.org/sean/linux/stodolsk/. The complete installation is very well explained in the Readme.
Best luck, Guenter P.S.: IMHO the Dell Inspiron is one of the most Linux friendly laptops currently available. I got everything working now, incl. VESA framebuffer for console (plus SVGAlib working with it!), XFree 4.0.2, APM, USB, IRDA, Firewire, internal cd-burner with SCSI emulation, kernel 2.4.2 with ReiserFS, sound, microphone, etc etc. SWEEEET! My last problem was a kernel panic during booting when I use a kernel with pcmcia support. However, this can be fixed with compiling a new version of pcmcia-cs with "Include PnP BIOS resource checking = y". -- Linux: Who needs GATES in a world without fences?
