newbie questions?

[beerstein]

HI there: Win modems and Linux almost drove me crazy a few years ago. I gave up on it.
I bought  external RS 232 modems for a few bucks at the swap meets. They all worked perfect.

[curaga]

With the usb 3g sticks the issue is that many need weird tricks, and some need firmware.

For example, until someone created the driver support for the early Huawei sticks, you needed to send a stick-specific command to the right device (there were three) and after that run usb-modeswitch with the right options. Not quite user-friendly.

[Rich]

Hi crankypuss
On the off chance that your goal is to get your modem working, see post #4 by Mikebat:
http://www.evdoforums.com/thread9995.html
or post #3 by DLinn in the link provided by maro:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=985611

[crankypuss]

Hi crankypuss
On the off chance that your goal is to get your modem working,

I'd like to get it working under TC, yes.  It already works under Ubuntu and Puppy.

see post #4 by Mikebat:
http://www.evdoforums.com/thread9995.html
or post #3 by DLinn in the link provided by maro:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=985611

Both of those use wvdial, right?  Are you saying that wvdial is included in the TC iso?  I didn't see any signs of it but didn't try "which" either.  Next time I have TC booted I'll see if it's there.

[Rich]

Hi crankypuss
It's not in the TC ISO and I don't know if it's in the CorePlus ISO. I do know you have other means to achieve your
goal. Take a thumb drive that has a FAT or FAT32 file system on it and download the extensions you need to it.
You can do this by either booting Tinycore on a wired machine or by pointing your browser to:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/tinycorelinux/4.x/x86/tcz
and downloading:
 libssl-0.9.8.tcz
 pppd.tcz
 wvdial.tcz
 wvstreams.tcz

[Guy]

Its not that simple.

You need to download all dep files and dependencies. Then you need to put apps in OnBoot.

Once installed you need to set them up manually, which requires you to know exactly what commands to type in. It is likely to take a lot of experimentation to get them to work, if you are able to get them to work at all.

[Rich]

Hi Guy
Yes, he should also get   wvdial.tcz.dep   and put   wvdial.tcz   in his onboot.lst.
That should be enough to load  wvdial.tcz  and its dependencies when he boots.
Both maro and I supplied links to instructions for setting up a Pantech UM175.
So now its his choice, try to make use of this information, or continue the conversation on how Tinycore
doesn't do everything bigger distros do.

[crankypuss]

Modems are speaking HAYES AT command set usually with some product specific extra commands. But basically a modem is an easy to handly device via serial interface. Try to find command set of your modem (ususally it is documented) and try it. After some experiments you can script it easy. Regarding serial interface I'm using Python but it is a personal preference.

Well there's the problem.  It's not hard to find out what commands are needed, I think all I had to tell Puppy was "ATDT#777" (might be misremembering), I think all the authentication is done by the hardware within the modem, there's some kind of cellphone id associated with the modem that gets exchanged with the tower.

The problem is that I don't know what to *DO* with the HAYES commands that are needed.  Ubuntu just came up and said "found a broadband modem, who's your provider" and offered a list that included Verizon.  Puppy offered a place to type the HAYES command string and to enter the userid/password, which I think isn't really needed (Ubuntu never asked) but had to be nonblank.

So having the information is not the issue.  It's knowing what to *do* with it that's the problem.  Presumably there's some Linux command to issue that takes the information and uses it to connect.  But I have no clue how to use a line command to connect a modem, or even what line command to look at with man. 

So I'm asking here, and what I get is some kind of "30 extensions are needed" thing, which probably has to do with onboard winmodems and not serial modems at all, I feel like I've landed in Brazil or something and can't speak the language.  Someone pointed me at another post about some "wvwire" command which is apparently another extension because my Ubuntu system has no man pages for wvwire. 

So if I was going to script the connection, doesn't matter what language, bash, whatever... there's some Linux command the script would have to issue to cause the dialup and presumably activate some pretty basic monitoring, right?  What is it?

[curaga]

So if I was going to script the connection, doesn't matter what language, bash, whatever... there's some Linux command the script would have to issue to cause the dialup and presumably activate some pretty basic monitoring, right?  What is it?

Quoting myself:

The bare minimum would be pppd and usb-serial

[maro]

I've been silent for a few days as I had some other stuff to do, but not much seems to have changed in the last 20+ posts in this thread: Some of the "usual suspects" are offering advice (repeating themselves and each other), but the OP seems to be a bit too timid to "put his little toe in the water" (or might be still waiting for a "shrink-wrapped" solution, which I suspect won't materialise).

It might be that the OP does not realise that it needs to be an iterative process of taking a step and reporting back here the exact steps undertaken and their outcome. Failing to pick up on basically any of the earlier suggestions does certainly not help to move things forward.

To provide us with some better understanding (e.g. whether any kernel modules are needed and the wvdial / ppp settings used by Puppy) I'd suggest to boot into Puppy 5.2.8 (with the modem attached and 3G networking configured and working OK) and run
    lsmod > lsmod ; dmesg > dmesg ; tar czf puppy_settings.tgz -C /etc wvdial* ppp
Then attach those three files here as attachments.


EDIT:As I was checking out something else I've now stumbled over a way to confirm with a high degree of probability that in this case for a device with 'idVendor 0x106c' and 'idProduct 0x3714' (as found in the attachment to reply #14) the 'qcaux' kernel module included in usb-serial-3.0.3-tinycore.tcz (assuming a TC 4.x system prior to 4.4rc1) will be required.

BTW, the command I used was

Code: [Select]

tc@box:~$ grep -i v0*106c[dp]0*3714 /lib/modules/3.0.21-tinycore/modules.*
/lib/modules/3.0.21-tinycore/modules.alias:alias usb:v106Cp3714d*dc*dsc*dp*icFFisc00ip00* qcaux
tc@box:~$Prior to the installation of the 'usb-serial-3.0.3-tinycore.tcz' extension no match was found. This might lessen the need for the 'lsmod' and 'dmesg' output from the Puppy system. OTOH I certainly believe that a bit more information in the process of troubleshooting can't do any harm.

[bibo]

Hi all,
since I want a quick way of getting to the internet for mail and perhaps a browse or two
I will either install TC or the minimalistic Ubuntu

I tend to use IXConn as a broadband connector and it works fine. You may have to set up a user under su and dip
sort of
sudo adduser xxxx dialout
newgrp dialout
sudo adduser xxxx dip
newgrp dip

Since I have to do it myself I will report back on how easy or difficult it was