Linmodems
(http://forum.mandrakesoft.com/article.php3?sid=20000905114341)
Due to wide avaliability of cheep junk-modems, "How can I get my winmodem working
under Linux" question has made it very high on list of Frequently Asked Questions.
For a long time, standard answer was "no, forget it", but this has changed lately to
"maybe", "some" and "to some extend", because some vendors provided binary-only
modules, and there has even been some progress on free-software front.
Although this question has already been discussed several times on this forum, I
decided to re-launch the story, because of two recent changes on linmodems.org and W&G
pages:
First, there is a new table on gromitkc pages, with list of existing linmodem drivers
and links to tarballs. Thus, search for drivers has just been made easier.
Second change is that Mikhail Moreyra has written a driver for the CL-MD5620DT
(Ambient Tech) chipset, and according to linmodems.org it does PPP! I have no idea how
good this driver is, but if you have this winmodem, make sure to try out the driver.
So, times are changing in Linmodems land, but don't expect too much. Binary-only
drivers are bound to give you problems on next kernel upgrade, and GPL-ed ones are
still in vary early stage (though the above mentioned one could be further than I
thought), so you should still avoid these monsters if you can, and we will not be able
to give you any sort of support if/when something goes wrong.
