Zugschlusbeobachtungen

A few months ago, I have reported about getting the winmodem in my hp compaq nc 8000 to work.

Aside from the abysmally slow performance, the dependency on out-of-tree, non-free modules has been cause of grief since it has almost constantly forced me to keep an outdated kernel version around just in case that I would need the modem.

Fortunately, this is over now since more recent kernel versions (I suspect somewhere in the 2.6.16 era) support my winmodem natively without out-of-tree modules. All I need to get only on a POTS line is sl-modem-daemon, which is reasonably painless.

The softmodems that can be found in today’s notebooks have been a mess from the very beginning. This especially holds when such a modem is to be used on Linux. Today, we have gazillions of different (and incompatible!) methods of using these gadgets, but none of them works with all softmodem flavours out there. This article describes what I have tried to bring my hp compaq nc8000 online, and how I finally succeeded.