Linux and PCI modems...

Rick Moen rick at linuxmafia.com
Wed Jan 26 11:06:06 PST 2000


Quoting Stagnoli, Paul (Paul.Stagnoli at CAI.COM):

> I am building a dual boot system with Win95 and Linux.  Which PCI
> modem will work with Linux? I prefer internal modems because of cost.

There is nothing _inherently_ wrong with PCI as foundation for an
internal modem:  It's an unfortunate accident that pretty much all of
them are crud.  You see, if you're a manufacturer who's already decided
to build a cut-rate winmodem, you will gravitate towards PCI because its
high bandwidth to the CPU local bus allows you to more easily offload
to the host machine processing tasks that a non-winmodem can handle
internally.

Thus, PCI modems are overwhemingly wimodems.  The two exceptions are
Multitech's MT5634ZPX-PCI and Actiontec's PCI56012 aka IBM 33L4618.
Those are _probably_ supportable under Linux.  At least, there are no
obvious show-stoppers.

More at:  
http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/#internalmodem
http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/#whichmodem
http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/#winmodem

-- 
Cheers,                             "Ceterum censeo Linux propaganda est."
Rick Moen                                        -- Seth David Schoen
rick at linuxmafia.com



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