What the heck do I call my modem?

Two weeks ago I bought myself an HP slimline with Windows Vista pre-installed and a dual core Athlon 3800. I am planning to install various Linuxes and maybe a BSD or two on the second hard drive.

The HP System Information Tool tells me I have a PCI soft modem with SmartCP. It does not tell me the manufacturer or model name. I did a search on the version number DV9000T CTO and got 224 hits, mostly to your forum. What I read seems to indicate that this is a series number for a notebook and not a modem.

I tried booting to two live CD Linuxes to see if they recognize the modem. DSL (Damn Small Linux) tells me I do have a Lucent winmodem. Puppy Linux's Internet wizard asks me to tell it which port my modem is on and provides a testing module. It did not recognize my modem on any of the ports offered in the test.

If all else fails, I can plug in my old external modems, but they are slower than my 56k internal modem, and 56k is plenty slow enough.

Any suggestions as to how I can get some more information about what kind of card I have?

JoanRC

 

I have to say I honestly don't know. Unfortunately I don't think anyone here that is experienced with Linux uses dial-up regularly.

I would suggest this website if you haven't already taken a look at it. http://www.linmodems.org/

 

Gosh, I don't know. Like BigV says, I haven't had to plug a phone jack in my computer in ages...

I know Ubuntu & Mint recognize my modem drivers. What dial up software are you using to test things out?

 

If one distro identifies it as a WinModem, you're going to have a hell of a rough ride getting it to run on Linux. WinModems run a lot of their features in software mode, hence not much Linux compatibility. All I can say is, good luck.

 

There's a program called "lspci" on Linux distributions. It will give you all the information you could hope for about every device attached to the PCI bus on your system. There's another program called "lsusb" that will tell you about the USB devices (often webcams and fingerprint readers in newer computers, like my laptop). If you do "lspci -v" you may see something like this:

Code:

david@Pitaweb:~$ lspci -v
<...>
0000:00:09.1 Communication controller: Conexant HCF 56k Modem (rev 05)
        Subsystem: Compaq Computer Corporation Grizzly
        Flags: medium devsel, IRQ 9
        BIST result: 00
        I/O ports at 1080 [size=8]
        Memory at f4004000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
        Capabilities: <available only to root>
<...>

The <...> parts are where I removed output to make it clearer. That should tell you more about the modem, and if you need more info, run the command with sudo or as root.

 

I was looking at the linmodems.org website, and it seems that there's a fairly active community working on making these drivers easier to install. As an example, the last update to their detection script was March 15th.

This script, scanModem, will detect what modem you have and create a directory with directions and information for installing the proper drivers. It's a relatively involved process, but if you follow the directions, you'll probably have success.

 

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In windows you can try running:


Unknown Device Identifier 5.02



Freeware
Unknown Device Identifier enables you to identify the yellow question mark labeled Unknown Devices in Device Manager. And reports you a detailed summary for the manufacturer name, OEM name, device type, device model and even the exact name of the unknown devices. With the collected information, you might contact your hardware manufacturer for support or search the Internet for the corresponding driver with a simple click. With this utility, you might immediately convert your unidentified unknown devices into identified known devices and find proper driver on the Internet and contact the hardware device manufacturer or vender. Known devices recognized by Microsoft Windows will also be analyzed independent of the operating system.

You are suggested to do a thorough driver backup with My Drivers after you have identified all the unknown devices with their proper device drivers software installed.


Supported OS: Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 98SE, Windows Me, Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows 2003. Future OS are supported via the online update. You might even run the small freeware utility from CD or floppy.


Features

- Identify USB 1.1/2.0 Device
- Identify IEEE 1394 Device
- Identify ISA Plug&Play Device
- Identify AGP Bus Device
- Identify PCI Device
- Multilingual interface: English, French
- Find Drivers for Hardware Devices
- Contact Hardware Vender directly
- Save or Print Hardware information

http://www.zhangduo.com/udi.html

.

 

Well you will probably have an easier time then I will. I already know what it is but the same chipset that controls the modem controls the sound. Kinda a PITA. Anyways good luck. Lucent Winmodems are better supported than Conexant based winmodems.

 

Thanks to everyone who replied. There seem to be some very usefull ideas here, which I will try on my next days off (tomorrow, the computer gods willing). I will try to remember to post results, on the off chance that someone else might benefit from my experience.

Last time I needed to identify a modem card for Linux, I ended up pulling the card from the box and googling on everything that looked like a serial number till I found a driver for it. But this machine is still on warranty so I don't want to open it up yet.