Re: WinModem Driver for Linux?

Dustin Marquess (jailbird@alcatraz.fdf.net)
Sun, 06 Jun 1999 22:37:46 -0500


At 12:14 PM 6/6/99 , Jefferson Hunt wrote:
>Greetings,
> With all the recent buzz about pcmcia and laptops I can't help but
>ask. Is anyone working on hacking in support for the win modems? If
>you want to talk about a worthless port on probably half or more of the
>laptops in service using linux that would be it.
> Anyone know of drivers already in development? Is there a technical
>or legal reason we can't do this?
> I'd lend my two cents worth of coding to a project like this, so
>drop any info my way!

WinModems (just like all software-based modems) require software
to run. This software is the "brains" of the modem, unlike a
hardware-based modem. The problem is that since this piece of software
contains most of the code to run the modem, the chipset makers do not give
out the information needed to support these modems, as they would be giving
away most of their design information.

During testing it has been shown that some software-based modems
require almost 33% of a P5/133 CPU to run reliably, so I usually recommend
staying-away from these devices.


-Dustin

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