[ILUG] Getting an old Dell Lattitude on-line

[Marek McGann]

Howdy,

Was given an old laptop with the task of getting it on-line. Windows was
virused up, and proving impossible to keep clean, so the individual
concerned wanted linux.

Installing Mandrake 10.0 (Official) went fine, so getting the modem
working is the trick.

There are two modems, an integrated Lucent Winmodem which they tell me
should work with a 2.4 kernel, and a Psion Dacom Gold Card PCMCIA modem,
which Google asures me works out of the box.

The Psion card first:

I've put the information from cardctl ident into /etc/pcmcia/config with
"bind serial_cs to 0", which I thought might work, given info from
Google. PPP seems to be happy the modem's there (/dev/modem and
/dev/ttyS1) , initialises it and the log file sees very active (lots of
AT*s and OKs, and even a Dialing1892...). There doesn't seem to be any
sound on the phone line though, and certainly no indication from the
laptop speakers, that anything's working.


The Lucent Winmodem:

I tried installling Mandrake's 2.4.25 kernel in order to try to get the
Lucent working, but the machine won't even book with this kernel,
basically hauling up over /dev/hda with the complaint: DMA disabled,
"device not ready for command" and having continual timeouts after that.
Google suggests there may be an irq conflict somewhere but I've no idea
how to resolve that, or why the 2.4 kernel would suffer whereas 2.6
doesn't.

Any takers on either?

M