Network card and modem

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The ethernet card uses an ordinary Realtek 8139 chip, so the standard kernel module (rtl8139 for Kernel 2.2.x or 8139too for Kernel 2.4.x) works fine. Just add the line

alias eth0 8139too

to your /etc/modules.conf (or to /etc/modutils/eth0 on Debian and run update-modules). Unfortunately, the card doesn't seem to support link beat detection, so you cannot use laptop-net to automatically start the network with the appropriate settings (depending on the other machines in the network).

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The modem is a bit trickier. Windows reports it to be a "Generic SoftK56" and it works fine there at 33.6 kBit, but lspci shows more details and reports it as a "Conexant HSF 56k HSFi Modem".

I downloaded the source package for the Conexant HSF modem drivers for Linux from http://www.mbsi.ca/cnxtlindrv (http://www.mbsi.ca/cnxtlindrv). Running make install and then hsfconfig (both as root) installed the kernel modules and set up /dev/ttySHSF0 as /dev/modem. It also made the correct settings to /etc/modules.conf (or rather /etc/modutils/hsf) so the modules are automatically loaded.

The modem seems to work fine now, but I had to comment out the line

#auth

in the file /etc/ppp/options to be able to connect to my provider Lion.cc at home. This has probably nothing to do with the modem, but rather with the server of my provider.