What about controllerless "hardware" modems?

[clayton rollins]

Hi Marin,

On Jan., 18 2004 Marin Krkac <mkrkac at public.srce.hr> wrote:
>
>I have an internal "hardware" modem. When I bought it they said it was a
>hardware modem and it said so on the box too. It has an Intel/Ambient
>chipset, or more precisely, as the windows driver says, Intel 536ep. But
>I found out just a few days ago that it's not actually a real hardware
>modem. It has a DSP but it's controllerless - that part is in software.
>It's also called a HAM modem (a Host Accelerated Modem). There is a
>linux driver but I think it's only partially open-source. Is there any
>chance this modem might work under FreeBSD?
>

The best information I could find on this was a somewhat old thread
on -hackers.

http://www.mail-archive.com/freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org/msg38233.html

Looking at the code, it doesn't seem as though it would be impossible
to port the code. But, it's definitely not something a typical newbie
would want to do. (Maybe if you're good in C, already.)

You might try running one of the binary linux drivers through linux
compatibility. If you need technical assistance in doing this, the
-questions list should be able to help you. There is a chapter in the
handbook on this:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/linuxemu.html

Alternately, you might contact the originator of that thread, to see
if they had already created some hacked version.
(Braulio José Solano Rojas)

>
>Buying a new modem could be an option, but now that I've found out this
>"hardware" modem isn't exactly what I thought it would be, I'm confused.
>Besides soft modems, the only cheaper models I could buy are all
>contorollerless. There are some cheaper external models, but it says
>that they are also built around the Intel/Ambient chipset, so I don't
>see how they could be any better, even though they're external (that's
>really confusing me - so far I thought that there was no way you could
>go wrong with an external modem).
>
>The only thing that's left are the expensive models, like US Robotics.
>But they are a little too expensive for me, and I really don't see a
>point in running FreeBSD without a modem.
>
>Any advice would be really appreciated.
>Thanks.
>

I've not used any modems under freebsd, nor could I find a good
document to point you to for this information. Sorry.

Regards,
Clayton

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