Problem and solution activating internal PCI modem

[Walter Dnes]

  I'm an IStop customer, and my backup account at 295.ca came in handy
last week<g>.  Having one external modem for 2 machines is a bit of a
problem, however.  One machine has a USR PCI internal modem which can
be autodetected by wvdialconf on some distros, but not on others.  I
went to some extra trouble to get it working.  Here's a snippet from
"cat /proc/pci"

Bus  0, device  16, function  0:
  Serial controller: 5610 56K FaxModem 56K FaxModem Model 5610 (rev 1).
    IRQ 9.
    I/O at 0x1470 [0x1477].

  After a couple of hours of screwing around with setserial, I wasn't
able to get any reaction from it.  I finally stumbled over the answer by
accident.  The first 4 serial ports (ttyS0..ttyS3) seem to be reserved
for modems that have their I/O ports in a "normal" range, i.e. 3 hex
digits.  Modems with I/O ports outside that range, have to use ttyS4 or
higher.

  I had originally compiled my kernel with support for only 4 serial
ports.  As soon as I re-built it with support for 8 serial ports (5
probably would've been sufficient) wvdialconf was able to automagically
detect the PCI modem and configure it as ttyS4.  It was that simple.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org>
An infinite number of monkeys pounding away on keyboards will
eventually produce a report showing that Windows is more secure,
and has a lower TCO, than linux.
--
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