Dell i7500 or Toshiba 1005-S157?

[Timothy Luoma]

On Sun, 21 Sep 2003 11:58:23 +0930, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at FreeBSD.org> 
wrote:

> There's a very good chance that you'll have trouble with the modem.
> It's probably a winmodem, and there's little support for them in
> FreeBSD.  I've never tried on my Inspiron 7500, but it's possible that
> the ltmdm port (/usr/ports/comms/ldmdm) will work on either machine.

Well.... poop.

The i7500 will work, according to Joshua Malone[1].  We talked a week or 
so ago and he said that he had gotten it working.  Normally I wouldn't 
quote private mail, but I'm going to assume it's OK to break that rule as 
it may help others trying to accomplish this.  Joshua was exceedingly 
helpful and talking with him really encouraged me to give it a try.  Here 
is what he had to say about the Winmodem in the Dell Inspiron 7500

# begin
I DO have the winmodem working on the 7500.
In /usr/ports/comms/ltmdm/ there is a port of the
Linux lucent winmodem driver ("ltmdm") for FreeBSD.  This is basically a
shim for the Linux driver that makes a FreeBSD loadable module.

However, there is a flaw in the port's design in that it installs
the script to load the device driver in /usr/local/etc/rc.d so it gets
loaded after the system boots.  To properly initialize this modem, you
need to copy the driver ("ltmdm.ko" I believe) to /modules and add the
line
<pre>
ltmdm_load="YES"
</pre>
to the file /boot/loader.conf to make the module load <i>before</ithe
system boots.
# end

I don't even think I *have* an external modem anymore.  I had a USB 56k 
but I loaned it to someone and never got it back, and I'm not even sure if 
that would work.

Well maybe I need to just plan to use the Toshiba for Windows and start 
trying to get the Dell running FreeBSD, since that's the machine I'm more 
likely to want to actually use anyway, and I know that it can be made to 
work.  FreeBSD on the Toshiba just seems like a wasted effort.  Even if I 
did get it up and running I think it would just be practice for the Dell.

Well thanks, one and all.  Now I need to get your opinions on 4.x vs 5.x.  
I guess I should post a new thread for that.

TjL


[1] http://www.ubergeeks.com/~jmalone/


-- 
Toying with the idea of putting FreeBSD on a Dell Inspiron 7500 laptop