[ILUG] Testing COM ports on Gigabyte Motherboard.

[John Gay]

Sent by:  Liam Bedford <lbedford at wbtsystems.com>



To:   John Gay/IE/3Com
cc:   ilug at linux.ie
Subject:  Re: [ILUG] Testing COM ports on Gigabyte Motherboard.




:Liam wrote

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:

My modem has jumpers, and I have set the jumpers for COM3 int4. This bypasses
the plug-N-pray settings. The modem doesn't even show up in pnpdump! On a
happier note, after I tried and proved my on-board com ports with two minicoms,
ttyS2 showed up and the modem started working!!! shutting down and restarting
Linux seems to require opening and closing at least one of the on-board com
ports before the modem works, otherwise setserial /dev/ttyS2 reports device
busy. I managed to get pilot-manager to work, after I found out the com 1 and
com 2 were switched??? I have the cradle plugged into com2 and pilot-manager set
for /dev/ttyS0 and it works. If I boot my system and use pilot-manager, then the
modem works first time! I still don't have an ISP yet because I need to get
several things sorted with my system first, but does anyone know if there is
anywhere I can connect and download files in Ireland from a BBS-type system
without an ISP?



> 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:

Not sure from the top of my head. I know it works with Open Sound System. Where
can I find the setting oss used so I can compile sound support into the regular
kernel? I'm sure it's there somewhere. It's nice to listen to my Beatles songs
while I work on other things, I just hate having to do soundoff, soundon every
twenty minutes. Funny thing, though. If I'm playing a CD, the sound doesn't time
out. Only if I'm playing MP3's with x11amp?



> I also have a
> 3COM TX ethernet card that seems to be recognised 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.

Haven't even had a look at this yet. I want to get my daughter a cheap PC and
network it as an X terminal from mine. I'll worry about it then. Thanks for the
info, though.


>
> 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 :)

Thanks for this tip, it worked a treat and freed up my modem?!? pity it didn't
show me that the com ports were reversed? Now I got my pilot on linux, I'll have
to look into KPilot or something similar. I suppose KPilot requires KDE. Damn! I
need to get connected to the net, I just need to figure out a few more things
before I trust connecting to the WEB. Thanks again to everyone who replied and
offered help. I know eventually I'll be able to return the favour for someone.

Cheers,

     John Gay