USB dialup modem for Puppy

For the puplet that I am planning to work on after 4.1.1 is out-the-door, I intend to cut down support for software modems, not having any 3rd-party modem drivers in the puplet.

Mostly I would recommend to people, get a external serial modem, but these days there are many PCs and of course laptops that do not have a serial port. So, is there any new true hardware USB dialup modem available, that someone can purchase? -- not something that is end-of-product just being sold off cheap, but a modem that is still being manufactured.

I found this:
http://www.radi.com/modular47.htm
...nice, but this is an OEM company, and they want from US$49 per 1000, and I couldn't find any site where that offer had been taken up and the product being resold.

The USRobotics company have a couple of USB modems, one of which they state is Linux-compatible:
http://www.usr.com/products/modem/modem-product.asp?sku=USR5637
...this is a "controller-based" modem, which I thought was another way of saying that it is not really a true hardware modem, just partly. It is model USR5637 and costs US$49.99.

The site is unclear about what driver is required, but I found this:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=728384
...yes, all it needs is the cdc-acm driver. This is good news. It should work out-of-the-box in Puppy.

It would seem then, for all those modem enquiries, "which modem will work with Puppy?", we do have one that we can advise people to purchase. Unfortunately, I can't find anyone in Australia selling them -- of course, I can buy it from the US, but it would be illegal to use here as it has to go through the Aussie telecom certification process first which is what an importer would do. It then gets a little sticker on it to certify that it complies with Australian telecom standards.
...my guess is that these modems are configurable for anywhere in the world?

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Comments

ALSA 1.0.18 is finally out
Username: happypuppy
The latest update of ALSA is finally released and this time it contains a large number of significant bugfixes and updates.The overall compatibility and stability is much better compared to the previous version. [b]Includes tons of HDA Codec fixes and driver improvements[/b] It would be really nice if this update makes its way into the Service Pack.It's a major bugfix release after all.

Re: alsa 1.0.18
Username: BarryK
"It's not a simple operation. The kernel drivers all have to be upgraded, as well as the libraries and utilities. Nup, maybe for 4.2.

USB modem support
Username: hounded
"I came into this problem from the other end, and arrived at the same place. Specifically the Eee 901 has no serial port. I Googled furiously, and found happy US customers with a USR5637 plugging into a Xandros-driven Eee 901 and getting straight out. I tossed up, legality aside, and realised I would need a lot of faith in my initialisation strings if I didn't want to get caught, always assuming they are fully AT configurable. At that point I decided, like dogone, to go the other way. I bought locally (Melbourne) a Belkin USB/Serial adaptor (F5U409) which is the standard by which others are judged. Xandros recognised it, but loaded no driver. Pupeee (3.01 based) loaded no driver either, and wvdialconf had nothing to look for. This is no place to quote the whole kernel messages, but the old (October 2008) Ubuntu-eee first loaded usb-serial.c (USB Serial support registered for generic), whch detected the MCT U232 chip in the Belkin converter. Next the mct_u232.c (Magic Control Technology USB-RS232 convertor driver z2.1) was loaded. I plugged my Banksia 56K into the Belkin serial socket, ran wvdialconf/wvdial as usual, and was straight on to my ISP. This tour-de-force was unfortunately a demo only, since the (presumably) Ubuntu auto-updaters waylaid Firefox within a few seconds of getting out on the Net. My Turbo Pascal was never red hot, so I'm a long way from writing a Belkin clone driver that is (say) Pupeee compatible. What is morally nice about the dogone approach is that rather than browbeating an importer (difficult) to bring a USB modem into just one country (ours) the usbserial driver approach allows the entire world to run serial modems on the Eee.

USB modem support
Username: hounded
"To almost quote Barry from a few inches above "it's not as simple as that". There are various usb/serial converter chipsets. The Belkin converter described has one of the most common to be configured for, but the others have had plenty of work since around 2000. If you want to know more than I do on the subject (not difficult) then Google: usb mct driver usbserial linux howto

Tags: puppy