[ILUG] Getting an old Dell Lattitude on-line

[Ciaran Mac Lochlainn]

Marek McGann wrote:

>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.
>  
>
If you think you have an IRQ conflict, you can try to narrow it down by 
removing and/or disabling hardware in BIOS, and seeing if the system boots.

General Winmodem Information:

NB - I haven't used a Winmodem for about a year, so this information may 
not be the most up-to-date.  I haven't checked any of it.

If your Winmodem has a supported chipset, you can download the 
proprietary kernel module which is needed to control it.  Most Lucent 
chipsets are supported.

Type "lspci -vv" to find out your chipset.

See also:
http://linmodems.technion.ac.il/Linmodem-howto.html
http://www.linmodems.org/
http://www.heby.de/ltmodem

Winmodem modules are available for 2.6.7 and 2.6.8 on Fedora.  SuSE 
includes the module in disitributions 9.0 and later.

The module you need for 2.4.25 on Mandrake is probably at:
http://www.physcip.uni-stuttgart.de/heby/ltmodem/dists/mandrake/8.30a3/

You can download source at:
http://www.physcip.uni-stuttgart.de/heby/ltmodem/ltmodem-8.31a8.tar.gz

The module is proprietary so it will "taint" your kernel, which means 
the running kernel be flagged as "tainted" by a module whose license is 
not compatible with the GPL.  Tainted kernels are not supported on LKML 
and/or elsewhere.  You may have noticed the discussion on ILUG last week 
about binary kernel modules...

http://linmodems.technion.ac.il/archive/msg02461.html

Also, because the signal processing is done in software, you may notice 
the system performance degrades while you dial out.