Internal modem; anyone get one to work???

A friend heard me kvetching about the difficulty of getting WIN XP working on my new Athlon machine and handed me a Knoppix 2.0 CD. I ran it and was pleasantly surprised by the experience, so I sez "why not try going online??" I used the setup wizard (actually "dialog")but kept getting "modem busy" (after it started by saying "modem ready").

BTW, In WIN, I'm on Com3 so I was configuring it (in the dialog) as ttyS2. I tried other tty settings with no luck and dev/modem (or whatever, I'm a real newbie, obviously) was even worse.

Anyway, I went back to WIN and then online and found this forum through a link from knoppix.org. I've searched on various terms and found discouraging posts, but I figured I'd see if anything new has been discovered :-)

This modem is branded a Broadxent (by Creative) and that's how WIN98 PnP had it listed. However, WinXP shows it as an ESS ES56T-PI data fax modem, and that's how it responds to a query, so I suppose that's its real identity. I found some posts about a similar ESS modem and they were speculating that it was a Winmodem. No one said for sure that it was, but I reckon that I'd better accept that as bad news.

Is there any hope to get this thing working in Linux??? In Knoppix?

Your wisdom is eagerly sought.

Cheers/Fader

Can you talk to the modem with minicom? I can't think of the site but there is a program that should detect your modem. I used it on my Aopen fm56 PX modem and then downloaded drivers from Linuxant. The drivers worked but their limited to 14k or something. For the price of the full driver you can get a serial modem at pcimicro, for $18.

I would suggest getting a cheap serial modem. It's not worth the hassle to mess with these internal modems IMHO...if you plan on getting serious with linux. And for me internet access is a make or break issue if I was to switch.

By the way...I did this on mandrake 9.2. I tried it on knoppix and Phlak and I'm not aware of any way to actually install software on the live cd, since it's read only. Unless you remaster or something and I'm not going there.

age,

thanks for the info. I have that modem on order. What a heck of a deal, and V.92 even. That's about the price of the accessories that come with it!!

As for using a 14.4 Kbaud modem, that just isn't on!!!

If this thing works well, I'll order a couple for spares, as I live in a very lightning-prone area. I've lost count, but I've had more than 6 dead modems in less than 6 years, and this is with surge suppressors on the line.

I will try minicom, just for giggles, but I don't plan on using the winmodem.

Maybe I misunderstood (I'm a *real* newbie) your comment below as to installing Knoppix, but there are two utilities that allow "easy" Knoppix installs to the HDD, and there was an article on doing it before those utilities were available. I also remember an article about a year ago about using Knoppix as a front end for Debian installs. Maybe you were talking about getting those drivers on the CD???

Cheers/Fader

Did you read the long-running item in 'The Lounge' on internal modems?
OG.

No, Geez,

I don't even know of The Lounge; as above, I'm a real newbie. I'll have a search.

Tnx/Fader

Minicom... hmmm. I looked at the HOWTO on modems, but id doesn't give a blow-by-blow for suing minicom to talk to the modem, and I don't know enough to proceed.

Anyone know of a detailed instruction for this process?

tnx/Fader

Did you miss the main message? Don't do it! Internal modems are a waste of your time, resources and money - forget them!
OG.

didn't miss a thing, Oldg. I have the internal modem and it's installed, so no money spent. And, as the old joke says, "What's time to a damned old pig?"

I have an external modem on order, but in the meantime, I'd like to see if I can talk to this one just to learn a bit about using linux.

Cheers/The Fader

Fair comment! Best of luck. The lessons to be learnt from internal modems were summerised in the other thread, however, and elsewhere in these fora.
OG.