[ILUG] Testing COM ports on Gigabyte Motherboard.

[Liam Bedford]

John Gay wrote:

>  Finally I was able to get the basic concept.
> setserial /dev/ttyS0 and /dev/ttyS1 both report fine, but setserial /dev/ttyS2
> report device busy. My modem is a U.S.Robotics sportster 56K internal flash
> modem. I am fairly confident that this modem does work in Linux from the
> documents I've searched on the web. This modem work fine in Windows on COM3 int
> 4.

That sounds like you need to do some plug and play stuff. Do this:

su -
cd /root
pnpdump > /root/isapnp.conf
and look in that file for configuration details (It has lots of lines along the
lines
of
(
******** Modem/Sound Card **********
***** Priority Acceptable *********
( INT (0) )
)

Edit the file to set the Interrupt for the modem to 4, and the address to 0x378 (I
think, that might
be printer though. I can never remember COM port addresses off the top of my head
:()
Then do
isapnp /root/isapnp.conf

and try setserial /dev/ttyS2. If you set the interrupt/address to anything other
than the defaults for COM3
you will need to use setserial to change the resources for ttyS2.

> I have a Crystal Sound card that works with oss installed. I only have the
> demo version that only works for 20 minutes at a time, I still want to figure
> out how to set up sound for free, I'm just not sure where to look.

Any ideas what crystal card it is? If it's the 4232 series (built into Dell
Optiplexen), then the instructions are
in /usr/src/linux/Documentation/sound. In general it's a question of:
make sure you have the ad1848 and pss modules (if you built the kernel, go back to
make menuconfig and
select the PSS option), and the cs423x module. The other module you may want is the
opl3 one for midi. Then
try modprobe cs423x io=* irq=* dma=*. You will get these numbers from either the
isapnp file, if you edit it
for the crystal, or the system bios. You can also (in rh6.0) use the sndconfig
program.

> I also have a
> 3COM TX ethernet card that seems to be reconised on boot-up, but I don't have a
> way to verify this yet.

try modprobe 3c59x, and then run dmesg. You should get a message about it. If you
do, then add
alias eth0 3c59x to /etc/conf.modules and use the X based control-panel to setup a
network connection.

>
> Is there a way I can use Linux to connect the two COM ports together with my
> null-modem cable and test the communications in a similar fashion to the set-up
> I tried with Hyperterm from Windows? I've read several MAN pages concerning
> serial, terminal and anything else I thought would be helpful, but I'm too new
> to Linux to figure this out for myself.

If you have a null modem cable, plug it into both, and run minicom twice, selecting
different COM ports in both.
Check the MAN pages for minicom :)

Regards
L.