Modems and Linux

Greetings all! i've recently bought suse 8.2 pro after a long period of deciding which distribution would be good to start with. Well, i must say i was blown away when i first got it up and running. The functionality and options available blow Mr. Gates and XP out of the water with a tiny reduction to user-friendliness. However that one little reduction happened to be kind of important to an aspiring security enthusiast like myself. It involved getting my modem working, or detected for that matter. During installation suse is completely oblivious to my modem but, once installed when i check out PCI components it can see it perfectly, in fact it knows more than i do, Full name, version number, features, etc. And when i try to manually get it up and running setserial doesnt seem to want to cooperate telling me that every serial port is having an I/O error. Im pretty sure that my modem is not a winmodem (but i could be wrong) however i did read that some older rockwell modems (of which mine is) have some compatibility errors but the only side effects listed were slower connections, not no connections. Im sure that the problem is an easy fix and the answer is staring me in the face, but still any help would be appreciated.

I had a rockwell type modem also. It was a soundcard modem combo. (horrid little bitch of computer component.) It IS a Win modem which is a problem. http://www.linmodems.org or something like that should help you out. Also go to http://www.suse.com and check the hardware database for your modem. if it's not listed you may want to send them a message or something or send the modem mans a message asking them about Linux drivers. Linux works ALOT better with networks than dial up. A cable connection is very easy to do in Linux. (Im not saying give up hope and get cable Im just pointing out this is very easy too do.) Anyway, contacting them and searching online should help you out. Its not easy getting Win modems to work with Linux because they are designed to work with Windows only, but it is becoming easier. Not bad considering they arent even designed to work with Linux.

Thank you, my worst fears have come true... i was loosing control of my bodily functions when i thought i was dealing with a real modem.

My modem too is a sound combo. And unfortunately cable, dsl, etc. is not available in my area or i would most definitely be using it. Oh well... i shall try my best, cheers.

i personally would (and have in the past) just locate an external modem, and call it a day. make sure your isp supports DUN and doesn't have some luser interface that MUST be installed in order to work (ex: AOL and some other silly little ISP's) I'ld personally go with local service (through your phone company, or whatever) but that's just me.