Modems are the major help for villagers to access net, since broadband connections haven’t reached much of the villages. And for Linux users, configuring a modem, which is originally designed for Windows(Winmodem) still stands like a giant wall.

Many of the modem manufactures are providing binary files of the drivers for Linux with the driver CD. Even though for a new user, its hard to compile, experienced  persons could help in configuring it. But, take the case of Conexant, one among the leading Modem Chipset manufactures. Usually, with every piece of hardware we purchase, we also get the drivers needed for working with it. But, Conexant isn’t providing drivers for Linux with the driver CD. Its ok. May be Linux is now growing up and many hardware vendors don’t provide drivers for Linux in the driver CD, but it can be downloaded from net for free. So, when we search for its drivers, what we will come across is a site named Linuxant, who provide Linux drivers for Conexant chipsets. But, the free drivers they provide is somewhat like a trial version, which supports just 14.4Kbps, while the modem can support upto 52Kbps. It means, with it, we can use the modem in Linux, but maximum speed is limited to just above 2KB per second…

Another funny thing is that they are providing full drivers for 20US$. The modem costs below INR 300(around 7US$) and for the driver we need to pay extra money, which is thrice the cost of  modem.

This is a fact to think about. Why is a company like Conexant behaving so to Linux?

I tried in every way to achieve the full speed, like what we usually do with softwares in Windows, but it doesn’t work. I even managed to make the driver say its full version, but still by calculating the data transfer rate, the speed is the old 14.4Kbps. Has anyone found any way to manage through this? If so, please help me…

Today was a great day for me. I configured my internal modem in linux at last. My modem chipset is from “Conexant” ans is a HSF softmodem. I got a free driver of it from Linuxant. The free driver provides only 14kbps but, still its good. Thanks for the support from all my friends who gave me the instructions.

What I did was that I downloaded the latest version of ScanModemtool from limodems.org and used it to get the details of my modem. It generated some files and by reading them, I got the idea of where to get a free driver. I went to Linuxant and downloaded a debian package of my free driver(about 1.3MB) and installed it using the package manager. During the installation, I was asked to provide some paths and I did so and it worked…

Also, today installed the Lalitha keymap for Malayalam developed by the Swathanthra Malayalam Computing group. Its nice, similar to the keyman in windows and working perfectly.