I have this friend (no, really), he's interested in moving to linux, mostly out of frustration with his windows setup (which, incidently is pretty horrible). Now, after a huge amount of pain (about 2 days worth) I managed to do the magic parition splitting and get mandrake 9.0 on there. The current challenge is to get his modem working, because without it, Linux becomes largely useless to him.
Of course, it isn't just *any* modem. This particular modem is a Motorola SM56 PCI internal "win" modem. So, I began searching around and it turns out that Motorola had released binary only drivers, and helpfully, only for kernel 2.4.14. So anyway, I downloaded them, followed the instructions, and of course they didn't work (mandrake 9.0 uses 2.4.19 with a whole lot of patches applied). So back to google where I searched for this driver (sm56.o - not that I suspect that helps) and mandrake 9.0, and found this one guy who had claimed to have the thing working on mandrake 8.2 by effectively commenting out the lines in the kernel which were throwing the error messages about the driver and rebuilding the kernel. I was a little... no, a lot astounded by this, but thought there was nothing to lose since without the modem there would be no linux, and went along and did what it said, and lo, the module loaded. BUT, upon running minicom /dev/sm56 and attempting to use it, I got nothing back from the modem at all. Indeed, lsmod claims that the driver was unused. I can't remember the options in modules.conf exactly, but they were along these lines: alias char-major-24 sm56 options sm56 country=1 Now, I thought the char-major stuff had been obsoleted with devfs - is that right, and if so, what should it be instead? Or really what I want to know - how do I get this thing working, or where can I get *cheap* internal 56k modems that will work with linux? how cheap? In case anyone is wondering - I don't want to downgrade the kernel. This isn't because of any ethic of "if it's not still bleeding it's dead", just because I want to be sure that when he clicks around on all the stuff that is supposed to autoconfigure itself on mandrake 9.0, that it will work. Is the problem devfs? Do drivers need to be built knowing about devfs? I didn't think they did, but it's been a while since I've played with kernel source. I can *probably* get it to be devfsless if it would help (but again I'm reluctant to) Thanks all (and sorry for the verbose mail), James. -- "The Greatest Common Divisor is a curious concept in mathematics in that it is defined by its name. " - Number Theory and Algebra, Terry Gagen. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
