modem help

[Tommy Trussell]

On 2/8/06, Billy Pollifrone <billy at silverbaseball.com> wrote:
> I have installed a 56K Zoom ISA PNP modem. It had jumpers to disable Plug
> and Play, so I did that and set it to Com2/IRQ 3 and disabled the mobo's
> serial ports. I ran hyperterminal in windows to give ATZ and ATDT commands
> and got responses that I deemed acceptable. I then went into Ubuntu and
> looking at the dmesg output, I see the /dev/ttyS1 device and it claims to be
> using IRQ 3.
>
>  My problem is that I cannot get the System, Administration, Networking, PPP
> configuration to detect a modem, cannot get minicom to get responses to the
> modem and gtkterm gives many I/O errors trying to access the device.

The first thing to do is identify the modem very specifically so you
know which chipset it uses and so you can find some info about it.
Your Zoom is fairly UNlikely to be a WinModem (DSP or "soft" modem)
but you'll want to be sure. Here's a resource to help with that:

http://start.at/modem

Once you've identified it, you might try some searches to see if
someone has written about getting it to work under linux. And be sure
to check your settings in minicom -- the baud rate should normally be
something high, like 115kbps, but you might need to try a lower rate
to see if it responds. Plus you'll want to be sure minicom is set to
No parity, 8 bits, 1 stop bit.

I had an old ISA modem in Ubuntu Warty, but when I upgraded to Hoary
it caused the kernel to lock up the machine. If I had really really
needed it to work I might have tried tinkering with all the BIOS
settings, but because developers have newer machines, newer kernels
may not necessarily work as you expect on the older hardware. The way
I finally got that machine online was by going to a computer repair
shop and finding a "well supported under linux" PCI WinModem, used. It
cost me about US$2.