F8­x86_64 on the Acer Ferrari 3400LMi

provided by Conexant, but by Linuxant. If you want all the features, fax, 56k, etc., they will charge you for it. Although, a crippled version is free. I do not like that philosophy at all. First you pay for the product, then they make you pay again if you want to use it...

Fedora x86_64 has the ALSA kernel module snd_via82xx_modem pre­compiled. That module is capable of handling the internal soft­modem. Furthermore, this module is properly loaded at startup. However, the modem is still a Smart Link soft­modem so we need a corresponding user space daemon that utilize this ALSA support for our modem.

Notice that the source code distributed by Linuxant is divided in two parts, one general modem daemon and hardware specific drivers in the form of kernel modules. Since we already have an ALSA driver for our model we only need the modem daemon compiled with ALSA support.

That part is provided by Linmodems (http://linmodems.technion.ac.il). They do a great job in providing binary modem daemons, by regular compiles of the Linuxant code. This daemon may very well be compiled as a 32­bit executable. Even if we are running on a 64­bit platform.

Note: Unfortunately the modem support is still unstable. Depending on the versions of the modem daemon and the kernel it might work. Even though, it is very fragile and might very well break on the next kernel update.

Since I do not use the modem I can live with this situation, but I am not happy about it. The installation is not too complicated and is outlined below.

15.1 Installing daemon

Here are the basic steps to get the modem daemon up and running:

1. Start by checking that the alsa­utils package is installed:

#rpm ­q alsa­utils alsa­utils­1.0.15­1.fc8

otherwise install it like this:

#yum install alsa­utils

2.Verfiy that the proper ALSA kernel module is loaded and recognizes the modem:

#aplay ­l

...

card 1: modem [VIA 82XX modem], device 0: VIA 82XX modem [VIA 82XX modem]

Subdevices: 1/1

Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

3. Download the compiled modem daemon, SLMODEMD.gcc4.2.tar.gz, or

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Acer 3400LMI manual Installing daemon