Do any of you guys know how to get Suse to recognize an internal modem. I was running with Mandrake 9.2 which worked very well with my internal Cirrus Logic modem, but Suse seems oblivious to the modem

Is it a winmodem? (SuSE 9 is the distro that deals the best with any winmodems) Have you tried using YaST 2 to have it recognize the "new hardware"? (it should have recognized during installation without problems) If it has not, then most likely is a winmodem which can not "handle". Try going to www.linmodems.org to see if someone has written a driver for it. HTH Regards...

No, definitely not a winmodem - it is a US Robotics Courier internal. I tried YaST to try and detect it.

Are you able to use something like minicom to pass hayes commands directly to the com port? You should be able to just create a symbolic link to /dev/ttyS0 (or whichever com port your modem is set to) called /dev/modem and most programs will use that.

Well 3Dave, you've got me there. I do not know what minicom is, what hayes commands are, or what a symbolic link is. I thought I knew a fair bit about computing, but perhaps not. If you could spell it out a little more, I'd be really grateful. Dave

cd to the /dev dirictory the type ln -sf /dev/ttyS4 /dev/modem if that doesnt work try ttyS5 or ttyS3 etc. My PCI Hardware modem is on ttyS4 so I have to create a symlink in order to use it on some distros like knoppix

minicom is a serail communication program, like hyperterminal under windoze. It allows you to directly talk to modems, com ports etc If it is a hardware modem you shouldn't need any drivers as just about all modems understand the standard...... Hayes command set which is used to control them, query them etc. Most of the basic commands begin with AT (short for attention) and you don't even need something like minicom in order to use them as you can just echo the commands by hand, eg: $ echo "ATZ" > /dev/ttyS0 will reset the modem and should return "OK" $ echo "ATDT123456" > /dev/ttyS0 will dial 123456 You can think a symbolic link (aka "symlink" or "soft link") a bit like a shortcut under windoze....but much more powerful. It can point to a file, a device, itself etc and appears transparent to the user. Com ports under GNU/Linux are referred to as the following: com1 = /dev/ttyS0 com2 = /dev/ttyS1 com3 = /dev/ttyS2 com4 = /dev/ttyS3 Quite a lot of programs will automatically point to /dev/modem which is usually just a sym link to one of the above ports. Let's say that your modem is on com 1, first have a look to see if it already exists: $ ls -l /dev/modem If it does you should be able to see where it points to, eg /dev/modem -> /dev/ttyS3. If it is pointing to the wrong port, delete it first. # rm /dev/modem Note the prompt above is now a "#" indicating that the command must be run as root. Then re-create it pointing to the correct device. # ln -s /dev/ttyS0 /dev/modem The reason for doing this is that you can configure all your programs to use /dev/modem, and if in the future you change what port your modem is on all you have to do is correct the /dev/modem link and you wont have to reconfigure all your programs.