iLamp/tibook modem

[Carsten Milling]

On Sat, Jul 20, 2002 at 05:56:26PM -0400, Stefan Bruda wrote:
> At 22:23 +0200 on 20-7-2002 Carsten Milling wrote:
>  >
>  > > I believe it is the same (software, yikes!) modem as the one I have in
>  > > my tibook. If so, then you have no chance whatsoever (for the time
>  > > being, as well as for the forseable future--or people say) to make it
>  > > work.
>  > 
>  > This is a bit too pessimistic. I did not use the modem of my TiBook
>  > for a long time now, but I can say that I got it to work occasionally
>  > using wvdial under YDL 2.0. 
> 
> Yay, that's indeed unexpectedly good news (as opposed to any other
> source I have seen, which would invariably say that the software modem
> does not and will likely never work).
> 
> True, I don't need dial up on my notebook right now, but who knows
> what happens in the future. So, I fired up wvdial and to date I had no
> success (modem not responding). But then I should probably be more
> persistent.
> 
> Just to eliminate one potential problem though: I assumed that the
> modem is like any other on /dev/ttyS0 and I created /dev/modem
> accordingly. Is this correct?

Ok, just to satisfy my curiosity, I tried to get the modem work again
under my current setup (TiBook 400MHz, YDL 2.3 [with the 2.4.18 kernel
of YDL 2.2]). Here is what I did:

First I put my old wvdial.conf into /etc and run wvdial multiple
times.  No luck. Other than with my YDL 2.0 configuration, where this
worked occasionally, now I cannot get the modem to respond. However
when I run wvdialconf to create a fresh config file, it correctly
detected the modem under /dev/ttyS0. But running wvdial with this new
config file wasn't successful either.

So I gave up and installed kppp-3.0.1-1a (`apt-get install kppp`). In
kppp's setup dialog I changed the device from /dev/modem to /dev/ttyS0
and after that I could query the modem (from the kppp setup dialog
under the "Modem" tab) without any complaints. Then I tried several
ISPs most of the time getting busy lines or even 'NO CARRIER'. But,
and that's probably good news, finally kppp established a connection
(to one of of the more expensive ISPs ;). The connection was quite
reliable, I could browse some web sites with decent speed. 

Conclusion: it is at least possible to get a working ppp connection
with the internal modem of a TiBook 400MHz using kppp as the dial-up
tool under YDL 2.3. 

However, it might be necessary to reduce the maximum modem speed to
get a reliable connection. From the time, when I used the modem more
frequently, I remember that the connection died after some time unless
I tweaked the init string (then in wvdial.conf). Don't remember the
details now, but I think I took the init string from one of Apple's
V.34 modem scripts.

Carsten