rarsa- lemme say first, I
fully support PUPPY, and for many reasons. Also, I hear your points and in the abstract agree with them.
I was astounded that Puppy set up everything on my non-standard ITX Epia. I'm not griping about this breakthru distro. Not at all.
that said... how old is Linux now?
I was trying to give a sense of the frustration that a basic function- one which determines whether you can communicate, or get needed downloads - is still so tangled in obscurity and kludging. It's easier to set up the DVD burner.
Take a look at the 'working modems' listed here in the wiki at:
http://www.goosee.com/puppy/wikka/PuppyHardware
these are the only internal ones listed that aren't PCMCIA or ISA:
Actiontec V.90 PCI AKA IBM V.90 PCI.
Actiontec 56K internal PCI Call Waiting Modem
Diamond SupraExpress 336 internal
3Com Megahertz 56K Global Modem pc card, model 3CCM156
1646T00 REA 12 99035 4903835 96 Lucent - - an older PCI modem that is very fast
so I went to eBay...
the Call-waiting 56K Actiontec is listed maybe - the listings refer to a Dell 528UU & V.90- not enough info to be sure what's what.
the 3Com is not PCI, its PCMCIA.
the Diamond 336 is not currently listed
on the last- which sounds the best-
* 7 items found for REA 12
* 48 items found for 12 Lucent
* 210 items found for 12 96
* 1 items found for 99035
12 Lucent give a bunch of telephones, nary a modem in the bunch.
now add in some of the wiki 'working modem' user comments, which I think would initially faze most anybody:
I had to clear config data in BIOS before it worked.
You only need to go through the puppy modem wizard to set it up.
Quick recap: Using the puppy modem wizard froze my system, and it could only be rescued via a hard reboot.
for getting Linmodems working with Linux (not easy)
http://www.linmodems.org/∞
I'm not saying that every driver in existence should be in PUPPY; or that all the VoIP, FAX, etc features should be supported right from the first LiveCD session.
I am saying that according to LINUX COUNTER, there are 29 million people using LINUX. http://counter.li.org/estimates.php
One would think that any modem manufacturer would cater to that number. That they don't may be due to the 'registered driver' hold that MS has on any hardware maker- & the same lockout deal was pulled on the Netscape browser.
According to PC World, in 2000 there were
a quarter of a billion people still using dial-up. That's 40% of all net users.
http://pcworld.about.com/news/May022001id48467.htm
I'd guess that the majority of these people are still using their ol' steam computers, for which PUPPY is perfect. So why let the modem stump them?
It's time to fix this problem- somehow. Maybe the tradeoff isn't 60M becoming 80M, its 2000 users becoming 200,000 users...