Lucent Winmodem success under SuSE 9.2-Professional

In a couple of other posts I mentioned that I was having some issues with my Lucent-based winmodem. The modem worked fine with the ltmodem driver installed, but only when, as root, I typed:

modprobe lt_modem
modprobe ltserial

Well, new kernels mean new things, and the days of /etc/modules.conf are gone. Under SuSE the same information goes in a file that resides in the /etc/modprobe.d/ directory. In a passing converation John from Netdirect mentioned modprobe.conf having replaced modules.conf - this lead me in the right direction.

If you cd /etc/modprobe.d/ you'll probably notice a few files that contain configuration information, i.e. sound, tv.

I simply created a file called modem in /etc/modprobe.d/ with the following information:

alias char-major-62 ltserial
alias /dev/tts/LT0 ltserial
alias /dev/modem ltserial

Note that this is slightly different that what's in the documentation, ltserial instead of lt_serial.

I hope this helps other Lucent winmodem users and users new to SuSE.

Modem users rejoice!

Dialup users finally have something to be happy about! As someone who has been using dialup for a long time I know the pain of trying to update a Linux system. Just 1 kernel-source update and you're online for days, even at 56K.

SuSE users now get a break, that break is known as "deltas." A delta is the difference between the version installed on your system and the current version available. Instead of downloading a huge file, you just download the delta and it gets applied.

To begin using deltas you have to enable it in your /etc/sysconfig/onlineupdate file. Open a xterm, su to root, and edit the onlineupdate file using your favourite editor. At the bottom set YOU_USE_DELTAS="yes" and you're good to go!

I managed to download ALL the updates for 9.2-Professional in one evening, kick butt for 56k.

Compiling a new kernel & a rpm tip

Compiling a kernel scares me. I've done it a few times, mostly in the day when I ran a less graphical system. But I undertook the task this evening with the hope of adding native kernel support for my Lucent winmodem. I followed each step outlined in the SuSE Administration guide but ended up with errors - so no luck. It looks to me like it might be an error in coding, but there's a conflict somewhere.

I thought reverting to older kernel source:
zcat /proc/config.gz .config

would solve my woes, but that didn't compile correctly either.

Tonight I'm going to check for new kernel updates and see if that solves the problem. Unfortunately on dialup it'll probably be all night downloading, c'est la vie.

Compiling the kernel has really peaked my curiosity because I tried the "hard" way, doing a make config (as opposed to make xconfig or make menuconfig), and I went through each and every potential driver (so many of them). There was support for some pretty neat stuff, radio cards, usb devices I wouldn't expect support for, touch screens, etc. It got me thinking about hacking kernels for specific projects (i.e. mp3 servers) It looks like it would be a good idea, especially for machines beyond the generic x86, (i.e. PIII Coppermine, AMD Athlons, etc).

And I came across a nice rpm (Redhat Package Manager) tip today while sifting through documentation

rpm -qf /path/to/file

the above command will show what package a file belongs to. For example

rpm -qf /boot/vmlinuz

shows the package belongs to the kernel packages.

Cheers