Quote from ducktape on Nov 13th, 2008, 9:58pm:I have Ubuntu on my computer. I have a USB modem and am trying to find a driver to make it work on Linux. Does anyone know where I can find one? I would appreciate any info about it. Thanks!
I'm sorry that this reply is so slow. I'm hoping that you've already got that fixed by now, but if not, try this page:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DialupModemHowto USB and Internal dialup modems are very frustrating to me, because in most cases both types are actually software-driven devices. That is, software running on your computer emulates a large amount of the work that a modem would traditionally do by itself. These are sometimes called WinModems. Conversely, the old serial-port modems (and some of the more expensive and rare internal modems) are much easier to use, and will oftentimes run on a 'generic' serial-port driver.
The reasons I don't like WinModems are numerous. Firstly, drop-outs. In cases where you're using a sub-par telephone line, or where the distance to your telephone exchange is high (such as in regional areas), you'll likely find that you'll experience more drop-outs with a WinModem. This is because, for some reason unknown to myself, WinModems train very aggressively on the phone line. Hardware modems seem to cope better, and will train at a lower rate to begin with. Perhaps the logic in WinModems for determining the phone line quality is impaired due to the increased simplicity of the hardware. Either way, you don't want drop-outs. Secondly, retrains. Again, we're talking about sub-par telephone lines here. After training too aggressively on the phone line, and negotiating a higher speed than the phone line can really cope with, your modem will notice a high degree of corrupted data, and it'll try a retrain. During a retrain, your modem will stop sending and receiving data and it will attempt to renegotiate a good line speed. This can take place very quickly (a few seconds) or it can take ages (up to or over a whole minute). In some cases, a retrain may even end with a drop-out. Again, you don't want retrains. Imagine having to wait 30 seconds every few minutes, simply because your modem can't handle the phone line properly. Thirdly, they're software driven. This means that the company producing the chipset will write complex software to emulate many of the modem's jobs. This cuts into your own processing power (although, admittedly, these days it's negligible due to high-powered multi-core CPUs). Furthermore, if you need to port the driver to another operating system that the hardware manufacturer doesn't support, the job will be much much harder. Fourthly, they're 56k, which in practical terms is only about 50k at most (on a good-quality Australian copper line). I prefer to pay more and get DSL. This is dependent on your budget and your degree of Internet usage, so that point may be moot.
I know that points 1 and 2 don't matter so much if you're living in a good area (close to your phone exchange and on good quality new phone lines), but I used to live in a fairly rural area, and my phone exchange was miles away. I trialed both a USRobotics serial-port 56k modem and a "no-frills" Conexant internal modem, and the difference was noticable. The serial-port modem was so much nicer, and would work perfectly in Red Hat (version 6, at the time). The Conexant would only work in Windows (because I couldn't be bothered trying all the crazy voodoo to try to get a WinModem working under Linux) and dropped out after a few minutes.
Bear in mind that Conexant and Lucent chipsets are very popular (at least in Australia) so don't be surprised if you find your modem has one of those two chipsets.
Good luck, and let us know how you went!
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