pcmcia modem woes
Hello all,
I've got a Dynalink 1456VQC cardmodem with my Acer Travelmate 512T, running
Potato freshly installed from stable CDs. PCMCIA version is 3.1.8 that came
with Potato.
When I plug this in the following error appears on tty1: INIT: Id "S"
respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes.
The "S" entry in /etc/inittab reads: S:12345:respawn:/sbin/getty ttyS0
The cardmodem seems to work at ttyS1, which is the first free port after
the build in ttyS0. So what is this error about and how do I get rid of it?
Any help and hints appreciated.
Hans
The following is to get things of my chest, so you can skip it if you like.
I bought my notebook one year ago with cardmodem, ethernet card and later
on scsi card. I installed slink, but because of a major relocation I didn't
use it much. After settling I put KDE on, but the modem wouldn't work: pppd
always died unexpectedly. I only found out that the network programs
package from KDE messed something up after I installed Corel Linux on
another machine and got the same problem. Mind you, I never used kppp, just
pppconfig.
I ditched KDE, then the modem worked only very sloooowly (9600 kbps). I
found a shop who loaned me a fresh modem card and things worked, so threw
away the old card and put in the new. That was nine months after I bought
the notebook and spending countless days and nights tweaking with config
files, re-installing Linux and pcmcia support and mailing with countless
people.
Over the summer I didn't do anything, just running Windows, but now that
Potato is out I thought I'd give it a try again. The error described above
was the result. I tried the latest driver for the build in Lucent modem
from the Linmodem.org page and it works, but then again, yesterday it
didn't. Same with the cardmodem: then it works, then it don't. Why? I'm
never sure why.
In this year the ethernet card has worked like a charm, never giving me any
problems. I haven't used the scsi card much, only under Windows. It is very
frustrating that I don't feel I have a stable system; I would have switched
from Windows to Linux long ago if it wasn't for this modem thing that keeps
messing up. Part of the reason is that there is no good modem diagnostics
tool, part that pon/poff doesn't give much support, part that the cardmodem
doesn't make noise, biggest part that the whole setup is so complex: card -
pcmcia - ttyS1 - ppp. I usually can find problems by tracing them back from
the end to beginning, like you do with electronics, but not so in this
case. I'm not a computer geek, can't program, just a guy with some brains
who is smart enough to solve problems by trial-n-error, elimination and
studying from other people's experience. To me Linux is like a huge jigsaw
puzzle and I like to do puzzles.
Not to give a wrong impression: I blame everything on myself and I am not
one would say "See, linux sucks." It's maybe that I do something wrong, or
just don't get it in this case. Maybe someday I'll find the answer. In the
meantime my two desktops have been happily running Potato and they will do
so for a long time.
Anyway, that is off my chest. Hope you didn't mind.
Hans
---
It's nice to be liked, but better by far to get paid -- Liz Phair
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