[conspire] (forw) Re: help?

[Rick Moen]

----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> -----

Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2004 10:48:17 -0700
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: "Grant E. Metcalf" <thegems at shellworld.net>
Subject: Re: help?

Hi, Grant.

Parsing that string from Commo, it seems to be saying

Port = 3 (i.e., COM3)
I/O base address = 3e8 hexadecimal
IRQ = 5

This illustrates my earlier point that hardly anyone uses the supposedly
"standard" IRQ assignments of IRQ4 for COM3 and IRQ3 for COM4, because
those duplicate the IRQ assignments for COM1 and COM2, respectively.

Here is are the complete set of "standard" hardware resources for all
four ports, for your reference:

COM1 3F8 IRQ4
COM2 2F8 IRQ3
COM3 3E8 IRQ4
COM4 2E8 IRQ3

So, you could (with assistance) disable your built-in COM2, verify
that your speech synth is on COM1 and still functional, rejumper your
internal modem to be COM2 (and disable "Plug and Play mode", if
possible), and (finally) reconfigure Commo to use COM2.  COM2 is so
highly standardised that you probably don't need to also tell it
"por=2,2f8,3", but those would be the correct values if such are
required.

(It's been many years since I used Commo, so I can't recall its
configuration details.  I was mostly a user of -- variously -- Telix,
Qmodem, and Procomm.)

Having done all that, making Linux use your modem via device file
/dev/ttyS1 (COM2) would then be incredibly easy:  Any Linux distribution 
should already include in its startup scripts a "setserial" command to
correctly initialise /dev/ttyS1. 

As a convenience, you would also want to create a symbolic link (an
abstract "pointer" pseudo-file) of /dev/modem, pointing to /dev/ttyS1 , 
via the following command (issued while you are the root user):

  ln -s /dev/ttyS1 /dev/modem

That symbolic link then becomes a handy alias for your modem device.  
Linux systems typically also have symbolic links /dev/mouse and /dev/cdrom ,
for similar purposes.


But you are perhaps seeing some of the reasons why I personally prefer using
external modems:  They avoid all of this nonsense from the beginning.
There are more-compelling reasons, but they are beyond the scope of
this discussion -- and are already covered in my essay on the subject.

-- 
Cheers,
Rick Moen                      "vi is my shepherd; I shall not font."
rick at linuxmafia.com                               -- Psalm 0.1 beta

----- End forwarded message -----