A memory of the Linux days long gone.
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A memory of the Linux days long gone.
I bought an ADSL modem that was a PCI card. Linux support was promised on the package.
The "Linux support" arrived in a .zip package. It had a Word document as instructions. At that point I had a bad feeling about it and I was right. They offered a precompiled kernel module for some ancient Redhat release. That's it.
I've since seen bad attempts at Linux support, but that modem still tops them all.
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A memory of the Linux days long gone.
I bought an ADSL modem that was a PCI card. Linux support was promised on the package.
The "Linux support" arrived in a .zip package. It had a Word document as instructions. At that point I had a bad feeling about it and I was right. They offered a precompiled kernel module for some ancient Redhat release. That's it.
I've since seen bad attempts at Linux support, but that modem still tops them all.
@apz I remember this! In a houseshare in around 2001 we built a little Linux router and we had a USB ADSL modem (for our 512k line!) and it was one of those things where once we had it working, we didn't touch it again for the year we were there
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A memory of the Linux days long gone.
I bought an ADSL modem that was a PCI card. Linux support was promised on the package.
The "Linux support" arrived in a .zip package. It had a Word document as instructions. At that point I had a bad feeling about it and I was right. They offered a precompiled kernel module for some ancient Redhat release. That's it.
I've since seen bad attempts at Linux support, but that modem still tops them all.
@apz could be worse
The documentation could be on paper -
@apz could be worse
The documentation could be on paper@joshlaw That could've been at least read with the OS it was supposed to work on.
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@joshlaw That could've been at least read with the OS it was supposed to work on.
@apz hmm, good point.
you know like the paper used in school paper?
The very contrasted ones that you can barely read?
perhaps imagine a Linux install instructions could be on that
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@apz I remember this! In a houseshare in around 2001 we built a little Linux router and we had a USB ADSL modem (for our 512k line!) and it was one of those things where once we had it working, we didn't touch it again for the year we were there
@jamesoff Since infosec wasn't that much in the news yet, I eventually got a copy of the exact Redhat release the drivers were for and put that in an old PC. It served quite long as a router/firewall, but it was also a good example of "Linux support" of the era.
I recall other devices too with similar support model and people hacking the compiled kernel modules to run on other distro kernels. From what I understand, the drivers were made under a license that prevented the source to be released. I suspect the device itself was pretty braindead and the driver was doing the heavy lifting like in those 56k WinModems too.
I wised up from the ordeal and bought stand-alone ADSL bridges from that point on.
