By Stephen Bucaro

Almost all modems manufactured today are software modems, usually referred to as "winmodems". Even though we pay a lot for a winmodem, they are cheap to manufacture because they use very little electronics. The functions that should be performed in hardware are emulated by software. This places an extra processing burden on your computer's CPU. Winmodems will not work with Linux unless you can locate a special "Linmodem" driver.

A hardware modem contains its own on-board controller and DSP circuits. This takes a major processing load off your computer's CPU. A hardware modem will make your dial-up connection work much faster. Hardware modems are difficult to find and very expensive. Hardware modems will work with Linux.

Some hardware modems known to work with Linux:

Zoom 2920 Fax Modem 56K PCI $76.00 Actiontec PCI56012-01CW 56K Voice Faxmodem PCI $75.00 ActionTec PCIV921201CW Call Waiting Internal V.90/V.92 Modem $59.99

On rare occasions Linux will locate and configure your modem during installation, but most likely you will have to configure it manually. If your computer is plug-and-play (PnP) compatible, BIOS should detect modem on power-up and allocate resources to it. To determine which resources were allocated to modem, log in as root and click on "Terminal emulation program" button on task bar. In terminal window that appears, type following command:

cat /proc/pci

In screen output that results, locate entry for your modem. Below is a possible example:

Bus 0, device 9, function 0: Unknown class: Lucent (ex-AT&T) Microelectronics Unknown device (rev 0). Vendor id=11c1. Device id=480. Medium devsel. Fast back-to-back capable. IRQ 11 Master Capable. No bursts. Min Gnt=252. Max Lat=14 Non-prefetchable 32 bit memory at 0x80100000 [0x8010000]. I/O at 0xdc00 [0xdc01] I/O at 0xe000[0xe001] I/O at 0xe400[0xe401]

By Stephen Bucaro

After you install Linux you usually find your display in a low resolution mode. If you were installing Windows, you would then install driver for your video card and use Display utility in Control Panel to change to a higher resolution. Unfortunately, with Linux things are not so easy.

Linux uses a free version of X Window System called Xfree86 to control your display. Xfree86 supports VGA, Super VGA, and some accelerated video adapters. If you have a new video card, or new motherboard with on-board video, you may want to download latest version of Xfree86 from ftp://ftp.xfree86.org

The configuration for Xfree86 is in a file named XF86Config located in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11. This file is created and edited by a program called Xconfigurator.

In Windows, monitor is viewed as a "dumb box" driven by a video card which is controlled by a video driver program. Xconfigurator seems to think that video cards don't exist and it requires you enter all kinds of obtuse information about your monitor such as horizontal sync range, vertical sync range, amount of video memory, and which clock chip you have.

If you have a no-name monitor like I do, you may not know all of these parameters. You may get stuck in display configuration step of Linux installation. This is one reason why I say "Linux is not ready for prime time".

This is how it should work: Linux detects your video card and configures itself.