Linux driver for PCTel / Oasis 688T modem found!

Finally. The Smartlink modem driver on linmodems.technion.ac.il now works with the 688T Winmodem! I am writing this post with the help of this driver, from within Mandriva 2006 (Free edition).

The site says that 688T support is only experimental, but I see the driver working perfectly as long as I view it as a mode of internet connection. It dropped the line when I received an incoming call. There might be some utility to disable the call waiting feature, but I have never used in under even Windows. I do not know about the other functions such as answering machine, fax or V92. The bottom line here is that it is working.

If you have been stuck like I was, download any driver upwards of and including 2.9.9, but you will do best to download the one named slmodem.CURRENT.tar.gz as it is the latest version at any given time. You would do well to download ungrab.winmodem.tar.gz and unloading.gz as well. This is because in some cases, after make and make install and modprobe, it turns out that the system has already recognized the modem as some other modem, and is trying to use it with a regular driver, thus grabbing it. Therefore, ungrab.winmodem, when loaded with modprobe before slamr or slusb (the modules created from slmodem) will ungrab the modem, which then can be used with slmodemd, also compiled from the same source code. Other useful utilities are lspci, lsmod and of course, the scanmodem script, which you can get from the Technion site mentioned above. Read the output of the scanmodem script carefully.

I still have to work out permanent loading of the modules at bootup and linking of the modem device, without having to do modprobe and slmodemd everytime I want to go online. But that comes later. Right now I am too busy telling the world about this success.

I moved to Mandriva out of sheer boredom with neither Fedora nor Opensuse supporting mp3s, video etc. Although Mandriva also does not enable everything by default, it at least makes some headway. I will install the other things. VLC (w32) has a limited success with Wine. Maybe somebody ought to compile VLC against the Wine API.

Installing Mandriva 2006 was really easy, especially as I was reusing the partitioning scheme I tried to create for OpenSuse 10. The software installation part is better than that of Fedora Core 4, but not as good as Yast under Suse. Although, thinking about it, when I tried to install OpenSuse as an upgrade to FC4, it was the most complicated matter, leading me to format and go for a fresh install. Overall, Mandriva is well suited for the newbie to average user, and manages to keep things together nicely.

I will have to learn a new package management system, right after I got familiarised with Yast right after I tried with varying degrees of succes using Yum and Yumex.