Linux Question

I have a slight problem with my other linux pc. Now everything was fine when I lived in the city because I was on a decent connection, not a dialup connection.

You see the problem is the pc has a win modem. Yeah yeah I know I know.

My question is if anyone has any experience with getting win modems to work with linux. I know its been done before to an extent.

I will have to get my modems specs, but if anyone could point me in a general direction.

P.S. Who all is running linux around here? This pc is not running it now though... remember, the modem issue...

I run Ubuntu on one of my computers. What distro do you use? Most distros have excellent communities with lots of tutorials.

Almost every modern linux distro can cope with such modems. Even wireless modems can be installed on linux machines these days. Have you upgraded your distro to the latest version? If not, that's what you should do first, good luck

My latest is red hat 9, and upgrading on my dialup would take a couple decades.

WinModems are tricky to get to and keep working, even on windows.
You can get it to work, but a Winmodem will never work as well as a hardware modem.

It depends on the modem. Generally there is a module that is loaded by the kernel, and then it works (or not) just like a hardware modem. You have to find the chipset of your modem. Many are from AT&T. I have a laptop with a SmartLink modem and it loads a module called "slmodem" on startup. It doesn't work well at all and freezes the computer after 5 minutes online. But before I had a TOSHIBA with an AT&T winmodem and had no problems except for the somewhat higher usage of the CPU.

Nothing is detected when I start up etc. I will have to check another time, but im quite sure mine will not work. Some just wont work period. :shk:

Originally posted by StarBreather
It depends on the modem. Generally there is a module that is loaded by the kernel, and then it works (or not) just like a hardware modem. You have to find the chipset of your modem. Many are from AT&T. I have a laptop with a SmartLink modem and it loads a module called "slmodem" on startup. It doesn't work well at all and freezes the computer after 5 minutes online. But before I had a TOSHIBA with an AT&T winmodem and had no problems except for the somewhat higher usage of the CPU.

It never works like a hardware modem, since its basic principle is that it emulates a hardware modem's chip.

Hardware will always have way lower internal latency and higher interspeeds then emulated, especialy when your surfing, playing games, watching movies and other things that use CPU cycles.

Originally posted by thematrix
It never works like a hardware modem, since its basic principle is that it emulates a hardware modem's chip.

Ok, ok. Details aside, from the user experience point of view, it has the same functionality as a hardware modem and is configured through the same dialogs, once it is correctly recognized by the kernel. If the processor is not too slow, there will be no perceivable degradation of performance.
If this is a new installation, I would recommend SuSE because it has excellent hardware support and very probably will recognize the modem.