Slashdot Mirror
The Linux Modem Problem?
muonman asks: "There is a business in town which refurbishes old computers and distributes them to kids, roughly at cost. Part of this cost is a $5 license for Windows 98 (they do use OpenOffice, tho). I have outlined to them the benefits of migrating to Linux, but the showstopper is modems, which most of their customers require. They buy in bulk at $4 each, with unpredictable chipsets. I can find reliable(?) drivers for Smartlinks, but cant buy them for less than $6 each, and I hate to recommend the switch in suppliers without more info. I haven't had luck getting license info from linuxant for using Conexants. It seems there has been no activity on the linmodem front for some time. Any wisdom from the Slashdot crowd?"
... be sure to let the rest of the world know about the modems that don't work at the Linux Incompatibility List:
http://www.leenooks.com/
http://www.welton.it/davidw/
contact the people at Free Geek -- all the machines they give away come with modems, and all the modems they get are scavenged from donated machines, so this is probably an issue that they have dealt with. they're also just a great organization. they can probably help with some of the other issues as well; they've been giving away refurbished linux machines to computer illiterate people for years now (a machine comes with a class on how to use a computer, and i think 18 months of tech support), so they've tackled a lot of these problems.
Probably a silly question, but you have checked http://www.linmodems.org/ haven't you?
A pril/001275.html
The main site is full of information to help identify and get working "windows" modems under Linux. The list still seems to be active. Before ADSL arrived in my corner of the world I was dependant on them to get connected via inbuilt modems. I can't fault the helpfulness of the people on the list.
It doesn't matter if the modem cards you're getting are unpredictable provided that you know that it's one of a small subset and you know how to get each one (or most of them) to work. When I was last looking at this (over a year ago - but I guess that the kit you're seeing isn't new) the most manufacturer that modems identified themselves as was Agere/Lucent, for which there are various drivers around.
Some modems will probably just never get Linux drivers - the 3com 3c556 and relatives are examples of that. See:
http://zurich.ai.mit.edu/pipermail/omnibook/2002-
with a winmodem is related to my laptop. It has a lucent chipset. I'm not sure if this is helpful but I have no problem getting up to date binary packages of drivers for this modem. (Right now I run FC3 and the modem works- installed with an rpm package- I consider that pretty current).
Drivers are available at http://www.physcip.uni-stuttgart.de/heby/ltmodem/
Maybe these are just older modems and you can't buy them anymore-- but if this type of modem is still available maybe you can get them for cheaper.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
I'm the de facto maintainer of the CLMD5620DT driver after the guy who wrote the driver disappeared (I just added an AT command parser, it used custom commands before).
:(
My advice : try to find actual, hardware modems somewhere. A real 33600 is better than a 56K winmodem.
In the particular case of the CLMD5620DT, it used to work sometimes with 2.2 kernels (the version I released, with AT commands, is 0.3.0-gg), I made a quick port to 2.4 (you may find it as version 0.4.0) and I have no idea if it works with 2.6 kernels. I don't even have the modem anymore
My website
The company is probably a Microsoft Authorized Refurbisher. I used to work for a place that did this, and windows 2000 licenses were also $5. Look here for some more information: https://www.techsoup.org/mar/default_second.asp