Modem users' pain

[Golam Mortuza Hossain]

Hi,
      This is my first post here!

Frank Siegert: Tue Dec 13 13:13:59 GMT 2005
> 13. December 2005 01:04, Matthew Garrett:
>
> | On the downside, we won't be supporting Conexant modems at all. Closer
> | investigation of the Linuxant driver has revealed that it's horribly in
> | violation of the GPL, so shipping it would just be an invitation to get
> | sued. I've notified the people whose copyright has been infringed, so
> | we'll see what happens there.

       Are you talking about some different GPL violation here other than the
mentioned in the infamous LKML hot thread
              http://lkml.org/lkml/2004/4/30/174
? If yes then can you please point out some references? If not, then
isn't that issue is settled now?

> They would have been limited to 14.4k anyways, so that is not too
> big of a loss I guess.

Hope you are not kidding! The loss can be as much as not using ubuntu
at all. Let me tell you why.

In my home ( in an interior part of INDIA where dial-up is the ONLY way to
connect) machine (has a D-Link modem which uses Conexant HSF
chipset), we get on average actual speed only around (not the initial
  handshake speed)  8-9kbps through 56kpbs dial-up connection. AFIK,
this is more or less the situation throughout the country for dial-up user.
So having a 14.4k "out-of-the-box" support is as good as having the full
version in reality. I guess it will be true in many parts of the world.

I am not an legal expert so I may be naive here. Linuxant seems to
permit redistribution of their "free" driver. So unless there are some
recent GPL licence violation issue, it would be great to have Conexant
modem support out-of-the-box in Ubuntu. Sadly, but its true
that majority of dial-up modem uses Conexant chipset.

Secondly, the modem installation CD that was given to us DOES
include Linux driver(a Linuxant OEM driver with inbuilt license key)
in it. Unfortunately, I couldn't install the same in ubuntu (5.10)
as its CD didn't include gcc-3.4 (worst blunder!!).  In retrospect, I couldn't
install mpeg support. So effectively, I landed up with an ubuntu box
having NO support for Internet, nor mp3 audio nor mpeg video.
So ubuntu slogan "It just works" effectively appeared to me as
a nice joke!!


In summary, if there are no violation of licence issue, it would
be really great to have out-of-the-box Conexant modem support
in Dapper. If not possible, then install CD should include at least
necessary header files and compiler to install the driver.


Cheers,
Golam