Re: Driver installation problems
David_Neuer@stream.com writes:
> The modem in the PC is an ISA card modem. Will this map to one of
> the /dev/ ttyS's? Rember, I'm primarily a Mac person, so I don't
> know an IRQ from my left knee, and to me an I/O address is a place
> one one of the moons of Jupiter that the postman delivers mail to.
Welcome. I was a Mac user for many years. Switched to Debian, and
never looked back (although IRQ's are spawn of satan). The hardware
can be a pain at times, but the quality of the OS, the support, the
performance, the features, and not least of all the philosophy far
more than make up for any hardware problems. Note that you generally
solve the hardware problems once, and then forget about them.
> If Linux can find my modem.
Should be able to, unless it's one of those evil WinModems (leaves out
some of the chips to save money, and "lets" your CPU handle the job
the missing hardware should have been doing). Linux doesn't handle
those, but if it's a good old fashioned modem, you should be fine.
Prepare for an intro to IRQs and IO ports. I tell you all this
because I'm in the mood, and because you *may* need to know it if you
have trouble getting the modem to work.
IRQ's and I/O ports are system resources, and for the most part you
can think of them as a way for hardware to communicate with the rest
of the system. For example, a serial port generally needs a hardware
address (I/O port) to send data to other devices, and an IRQ
(Interrupt ReQuest line) to notify the CPU (or whoever) that it needs
attention.
A PC has only 15 IRQ's, and these have to be assigned across all the
devices that need them. Generally devices cannot share IRQ's, and
some devices require more than one. Also some IRQ's are already
reserved by the motherboard. It would be nice if the system would
just automatically arbitrate who gets which resources without you ever
having to muck around with things, but in the PC world, it's not that
simple. The PC is an old crufty architecture, so sometimes you have
to help it along. Plug and Pray is an attempt to "fix" some of this,
but in many cases it's caused as many problems as it's solved.
What it boils down to is that for some devices you have to tell them
which IRQ they should use, then you have to tell the system about your
decision too. Telling the device may mean moving a jumper on the
device or flipping a DIP switch, or it may mean going to the machine's
BIOS setup screen and selecting some values. Telling the system (at
least under linux, if it's necessary (linux can often auto-detect this
stuff), usually means running a config program at boot).
Most serial ports require one dedicated IRQ, and you tell the serial
port what IRQ to use (or put it on automatic) with the BIOS config
program. On my computer you get there by pressing F1 during bootup.
A PC normally has 2 serial ports, and Debian does a pretty good job of
configuring them without any intervention, so you may be able to leave
this alone.
Unfortunately, the ISA modem card will have it's own on-board serial
port, so you have to be a little careful. Basically, you want to make
sure (if you can) that it ends up on a different IRQ and port than any
other device (including the built in serial ports). You may be able
to just set some jumpers on the card to put it where you want it, or
you may need to disable one of the other built in serial ports using
the BIOS config program so that the ISA modem can use the disabled
serial port's now free resources.
You can figure out how the serial ports are already configured on your
machine (assuming that you have linux up), by running "setserial -bg
/dev/ttyS*" as root (see "man setserial" for more info). This will
list all the currently configured serial ports and what resources they
are using. Here's a sample:
# setserial -bg /dev/ttyS*
/dev/ttyS0 at 0x03f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A (spd_vhi)
/dev/ttyS1 at 0x02f8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A (spd_vhi)
Note one port is using IRQ 4 and one is using IRQ 3. The 0xXXXX
numbers are the I/O ports they are using. I didn't configure this
myself; Debian did it at startup automatically. The script that
handles this auto-configuration is /etc/rc.boot/0setserial. If I had
your modem installed setserial -bg's output might look like this:
/dev/ttyS0 at 0x03f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A (spd_vhi)
/dev/ttyS1 at 0x02f8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A (spd_vhi)
/dev/ttyS2 at 0x0??? (irq = 4) is a 16550A (spd_vhi)
Note that the ??? would be filled in with some address, but I don't
know what it would be. Note also that I depicted two serial ports
"sharing" the same IRQ. Things could be set up that way, but you'd
have to be sure to never, ever use both ports. The sytem would get
confused about "who was saying what".
What you'd really like is something like this:
/dev/ttyS0 at 0x03f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A (spd_vhi)
/dev/ttyS1 at 0x02f8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A (spd_vhi)
/dev/ttyS2 at 0x0??? (irq = 5) is a 16550A (spd_vhi)
where ??? is different from the other two values too. This might not
be possible though. What I didn't tell you yet was that some devices
aren't smart enough to handle being at more than a couple of IRQ
values, so the ISA modem might not be able to go at anything other
than IRQ 3 or IRQ 4. In that case you'd probably want to do what I
suggested earlier an disable (in the BIOS) one of the built in serial
ports so that you can give it's IRQ and port to the modem.
> I'll download the software directly that way. In the meantime,
> anyone else have any ideas? I could use MacGZip to gzip the .deb
> files and transfer them on a PC-formatted floppy, but would I get
> much compression, or are the files already compressed to the max?
.deb files are already compressed, so you'd be wasting your time.
I'd say that one of the first packages you should get is the doc-linux
package. It has a horde of howto's in it which will be placed in
/usr/doc/HOWTO. There's a Serial-HOWTO, a PPP-HOWTO, etc.
> Anyone know of a compression/archive format that allows multi-volume
> archives with tools available for both platforms? Thanks, Dave --
The program you want on the Mac is probably SunTar (check InfoMac).
It allows Macs to read and write raw tar archives to a floppy
(multi-disk I hope). This will let you put the .deb files directly on
the floppys (no filesystem needed), and then untar them on the Linux
side with "tar xvMf /dev/fd0".
Hope this helps.
--
Rob
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