The only place I see this discussed seriously is at www.linmodems.org . They
report some progress, but my read of it is that you shouldn't expect to be
able to use a randomly-chosen Winmodem anytime soon. Of the people with the
skill to do this work, only a small number are intersted in trying. So it goes.
In the above, I assumed that by "addressing the problem of Winmodems" you
mean developing the code needed to make them work. Many in the Linux
community feel they are "addressing the problem of Winmodems" by warning
potential Linux users away from them. For that sort of response, see
http://www.o2.net/~gromitkc/winmodem.html .
And BTW, Winmodems aren't the only hardware that lacks Linux support, merely
the best known examples. Some printers (ones using HP's PPA language) have
problems, and scanner support continues to be spotty. There's also the rare,
completely unsupported NIC (the examples I know are very old; see the
Hardware HowTo for details), the constant race to keep up with changes to
tulip-based NICs, occasional problems with scsi controllers, and, of course,
delays in XFree86 support for the newest video cards and chipsets. I'm not
sure what's up with USB support.
In short, the original poster was identifying a real problem that Linux, and
its related packages (like XFree86), faces. These limitations were generally
unimportant when Linux was almst entirely a server OS ... but they loom
large as we hope to see it increase its importance on the desktop.
At 11:07 AM 4/9/00 +0100, Geoff Bagley wrote:
>Do you know whether anyone in the LINUX community is addressing the
>problem of Winmodems ? I am shortly taking delivery of a new system
>containing a Winmodems modem, but will be forced to use my old external
>US Robotics modem (until we can get a Winmodems driver).
------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"---
Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo
Palo Alto, CA [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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