Re: trouble installing on a mac

["Michael D. Crawford" <crawford@goingware.com>]

Well, I've made some progess.  What I needed was the file drivers.tgz,
not either of the files driver-1.bin or driver-2.bin.  Not sure what
they're for.

Once I was able to install my modules, I could enable the use of the ppp
and compression modules.

And _somewhere_ on a web page that some helpful soul wrote, I read that
the initial name of the provider configuration that is given in
pppconfig must be left as "provider".  My provider is mint.net so I was
changing the name to mint.

But I still can't dial in.  I don't seem to get any response from the
modem.  And by watching for the modem lights blinking, I don't seem to
have any data transmitted to the modem (no blinking).  It's not a
cabling problem, as I can dial in with the same setup under Mac OS 8.6
from my 8500 (where I'm sending this mail from).

I booted off the ramdisk, mounted my filesystems and went into a shell
so I could look at /var/log/messages.  I saw that pppd was attempting to
talk to the modem but was not getting any response.  I'm sorry but I
don't have the exact text of the messages but it was something like:

send ATZ
expect OK
alarm

shortly after which it aborts.

I looked up the modem init string from another linux installation that
I've successfully used and ut was AT&FH0.  I tried that, and it didn't
work either.  I don't think it's the modem init string because I'd see
the light on the modem blink.  (It's a Hayes 56k external faxmodem).  

When the machine boots I see a message regarding the serial ports being
detected, so the kernel does detect the serial ports.  However, if I get
into a shell off the ramdisk and do the following:

echo hello > /dev/ttyS1

I don't see any blinking.  ttyS0 doesn't blink either, and ttyS2 and
ttyS3 produce an error message about being unable to create something.

This is on an older, "old world" mac, an 8500.  Modern macintoshes do
not have serial ports.  Could there be either a bug in the serial
drivers in the installation kernel, or could the support for my serial
ports not be included in the kernel?

Thanks for any help you can give me.

Mike Crawford
crawford@goingware.com
http://www.goingware.com/

   Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow.