Si3054 and Hardy Heron… The Saga Continues
May 16, 2008 at 14:46 | Posted in Tech | Comments Off on Si3054 and Hardy Heron… The Saga ContinuesTags: fax, Hardy, Hardy Heron, receive, receiving, si3054, Ubuntu
Well it seems I may have been a little overly optimistic when I wrote this Blog entry. Although sending faxes was indeed working fine it seems receiving a fax was not so hot.. after more reading a tweaking I now can do both sending and receiving. It seems that in order to receive a fax properly you need to slow the modem down to 4800 baud (eeesh). So if you are only interested in sending faxes from you laptop you might want to ignore these settings and keep the nice 14.4 baud that you can send at.
Basically it boils down to needing to add to parameters to your faxing software.
the “capabilities” parameters passed to efax should look like:
1,1,0,0,0,1,0,0
your’s may vary.. the important number in that string is the second 1 which sets the baud to 4800
you will also need to add the parameter
+MS=32,0,4800,4800 to your modem init string. Again yours may vary the important part here is the 4800,4800 which forces the modem to only use 4800 baud.
Receiving is still not perfect but at least you get a lot more then just the top 8th of the first page.
hope this helps… again this is ONLY needed for receiving.
Getting a Si3054 modem working on Hardy Heron
May 7, 2008 at 10:00 | Posted in Tech | 2 CommentsTags: Hardy, heron, howto, laptop, modem, no dialtone, si3054, slmodemd, Ubuntu
Over the last 2 days or so I’ve been enjoying the challenge of getting the Si3054 modem in my laptop to work with Hardy Heron (Ubuntu 8.04). Early on I was quite pleased when the scanmodem script from http://linmodems.technion.ac.il recognized my modem and said all I needed was to install the slmodemd daemon for it. I was even more pleased to see that slmodemd was in the repositories as sl-modem-daemon.
I installed the package and started testing … and that is where I hit a snag.. Everything seemed o.k. but I kept getting “NO DIALTONE” when trying to talk to the modem.. and it was coming back way too fast so I could tell it wasn’t even really checking. After much googling and reading of documentation I found a post that recommended downloading SLMODEMD.gcc4.1.tar.gz and trying the slmodemd out of it. I did.. it worked. I could fax and everything… cool
so here is a brief rundown for others having the same problem.
First do install the package from the repository and test it with the appropriate settings which will look something like:
sudo slmodemd -c CANADA --alsa hw:0,6
Obviously you will need to change the settings to match your location and hardware
— update —
O.k. realized I forgot to tell people how to determine the “right” hardware”. There is a script from the people that make the drivers here. Download it.. then:
gunzip scanModem.gz
chmod u+x scanModem
./scanModem
This will create a directory called “Modem”
In that Directory you’ll find lots of info. You’ll primarily be interested in a file called ModemData.txt. In that file look for a like that reads like:
"The modem cards detected by "aplay -l" are: card 2: Intel [HDA Intel], device 6: Si3054 Modem [Si3054 Modem]"
This line tells me my setting (things have changed since I first wrote this) should be hw:2,6
—- end update —-
Then test the modem. I used minicom as I have been around modems since the days of 300 baud and am just plain used to talking to them with “AT” commands. You may wish to try the recommended wvdial test recommended on the linmodem homepage, or what ever other test you are comfortable with that will return good information from the modem.
If, like me, you find that you aren’t able to get anywhere try downloading SLMODEMD.gcc4.1.tar.gz. Extract it to a folder and then open that folder in a terminal.
make sure no copies of slmodem are running:
ps -A | grep slmodemd
should return nothing if you see a one running just
sudo killall slmodemd
now run the new slmodemd from the package you downloaded with
sudo ./slmodemd -g dialout -c CANADA --alsa hw:0,6
the -g dialout is added because the downloaded package is set to have a default group of UUCP that doesn’t fit well with Ubuntu (non root users won’t be able to access the modem because they aren’t part of the uucp group). Again you will need to set the country and Hardware up to match your location and hardware.
go and do your testing again. (minicom, wvdial, etc). If it works ctrl-c out of the slmodemd process. you can now either choose to just run the new one manually all the time (rather a pain) or just:
sudo cp ./slmodemd /usr/sbin/slmodemd
To replace the not working one with the one we just downloaded
Then you will want to edit /etc/default/sl-modem-daemon and set the following
Set the SLMODEMD_DEVICE= to your hardware (in my case SLMODEMD_DEVICE=hw:0,6)
Set the SLMODEMD_COUNTRY= to the correct country (slmodemd --countrylist
will pop out a list of supported countries)
you’ll also need to edit the OPTS= line so it looks like OPTS=”-g dialout” or you’ll have the uucp group/permissions problem mentioned above.
now save the file
and you should be able to do a
sudo /etc/init.d/sl-modem-daemon restart
then
ps -A | grep slmodemd
to see that it started o.k.
and then run your tests again and (hopefully) you now have a working modem
——- Update ——–
If you are trying to receive faxes and still having problems check this post.
Hardy Heron: Day 1, Part 2
April 20, 2008 at 18:33 | Posted in Tech | Comments Off on Hardy Heron: Day 1, Part 2Tags: features, FLOSS, Hardy, Hardy Heron, Release Candidate, testing, Ubuntu
Well a few minor bugs are showing up.. but as this is still a release candidate I’m not going to complain. Currently, I have to unplug my webcam when rebooting for some reason or it and part of the system get badly hung up. (it works like a charm if I plug it in after booting). Also, kqemu seems unstable now. Again not a biggie for me as my processor doesn’t support virtualization anyway so the speed increase using kqemu wasn’t huge.
For those interested you can find the specs on my hardware here.
I am very impressed with all the work that has been done to make the User Interface nice to use and many of the applications have some much appreciated upgrades
.
Things I like:
Totem has grown up a lot with the addition of DVD support (though not menus yet as far as i can see). it has nice search features and even a youtube plug-in
Vino, aka Remote Desktop not sports “advanced” features and they are much appreciated ones like encryption and custom port selection.
The system monitor also has a snazzy new look
There are too many other improvements that I will go into.. but some of them are for applications I use that aren’t in the just installed it, bare bones install so I’ll go into them in a separate post.
Hardy Heron: Day 1
April 20, 2008 at 13:11 | Posted in Tech | Comments Off on Hardy Heron: Day 1Tags: FLOSS, Hardy, Hardy Heron, Linux, Release Candidate, testing, Ubuntu
Yesterday I upgraded to the Release Candidate version of Hardy Heron using the update manager. Everything went exceedingly smoothly with only a few minor glitches. the panel and desktop launchers for Firefox lost their icon (easily fixed by pointing them to the new one), and on first boot several panel applets chocked, died and restarted (mostly due to old configs I suspect). This corrected it self and hasn’t been a problem since. The Dev’s may want to put in a notice for less experienced users to let them know that this might occur and not to stress about it too much.
Aside form that first impressions are exceedingly favourable. Nothing broke. The system as a whole is even snappier then it was before which is a pleasant surprise as I never felt that Gutsy was slow in any way.
It is still very early in my “Checking it out Process” so I’ll be posting more in the following days. But on first impressions. If Gutsy kicked Vista’s ass (which it certainly did on my laptop) Hardy will easily bury it.
Stay posted. I’ll definitely be writing more as I get a chance to check out the various changes and new applications.
Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.
Entries and comments feeds.