MrNybbles's Journal: My modem is now my bitch, as things should be.

So things started off with my modem being a bitch without being my bitch. Not good.

I finally got my US Robotics/3Com modem working under Debian GNU/Linux. It's the weirdest thing. The box said that it was Linux compatible (which it is) and the support page had a .rpm they said to install. I converted the .rpm to a .deb file and went through the scripts and couldn't get the thing to work. The scripts wouldn't work! They said the modem would use /dev/ttyS3 by default. (WRONG!)

When I tried to run setserial on /dev/ttyS3 it would tell me the port was already in use. (It would have been nice if it told me it was in use by ttyS4 !)

Keep in mind the following :-
COM1=ttyS0
COM2=ttyS1
COM3=ttyS2
COM4=ttyS3
COM5 does not exist in Windows reality with out a weird driver to give Windows 9x an acid trip. My US Robotic driver does do this, although the support page seems to describe this as being forwared to COM4, or the other way around. At any rate I am sure they thought it was a good idea at the time.

I finally ran `dmesg | less` and found an entry saying something about my modem being on ttyS4 which was a device that didn't exist. I ran `MAKEDEV ttyS4` and everything suddenly worked!

My BIOS has a setting allowing me to tell it my modem is either using int 3, int 4, or none. Because my USR/3Com modem uses int 5 I set it to none. I think this has something to do with perserving the modem interrupt so it does not get remaped, but Windows seems to remap it to int 10 anyway.

Why Windows likes to remap things so they share interrupts even when there are free interrupts is strange logic to me, but that's Windows for you; so smart it thinks it is smarter than you (and that's all it really ever knows for sure.)

Next up is to get Debian to work okay with Linux Kernel 2.6.1 which I heard stable doesn't do well. Time to upgrade to SID. KDE 2.x may not be the worlds best desktop, but what bloatedness will KDE 3.x bring? Maybe it's time to track down blackbox, blackice, whatever that nice window manager is called. Maybe I should try 2.4.24 first.

KDE 2.x also had a pesky little problem of having the sound broken except for the root user by default. I hope the next upgrade fixes that. Yah, I made my own fix, but an ugly fix.

Linux seems to do everything I want, has the software packages I want, and the stablity I want. It just takes me learning more about Linux than I ever wanted to know to get it to work. I the long run this is probably a good thing, but for the avrage user figuring out they need to run `MAKEDEV ttyS4` is asking too much.

I wonder if IBM will ever start selling PCs with an IBM Distro of GNU/Linux with IBM software support. Sell the support @ $10 to $20 for a years support (the automated binary updates for your system) and a distro on a disk @ $20 and you could make a nice profit. All you need to do to charge money to make a profit is throw in some coustom IBM packages related to a multi-media keyboard and IBM Desktop Manager. With an IBM Desktop Manager and IBM packages, everything is IBM Desktop compatable instead of worring about GNOME vs KDE.

One Standard to rule them all, One Standard to find them, One Standard to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.