On Mon, 04 Jul 2005, Ian Spillane wrote:
> That's another plug threatening to melt the house down!
>> Is a serial modem by definition linux compatible?
Moreorless. My understanding (such as it is) of the situation follows:
With a hardware (aka "real") modem, there is circuitry inside the modem
which does the low level dialling, encoding/decoding and so forth and you
need only send it commands like "AT1890110110" which will get it to dial.
A "winmodem" is a software modem which is apparently more like a cheap
sound card. Software does all the extra grunt work of dialing etc. and the
card just echoes it down the line.
Winmodems often don't have non-Windows drivers (with some exceptions) and
are not great anyway (cpu hogging, crashing) so you should avoid them.
http://linmodems.org/
Winmodems require fast connections to the computer as audio data travels
between. A serial connection cannot handle this amount of data. For that
reason a serial modem is generally guaranteed to be a hardware modem.
There are PCI card modems which are hardware modems though. Marx Computers
in Clontarf/Marino sell a serial port one and (apparently) a PCI one which
supports linux:
http://www.marxcomputers.ie/
Gavin
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