Hello all, I've got a Dynalink 1456VQC cardmodem with my Acer Travelmate 512T, running Potato freshly installed from stable CDs. PCMCIA version is 3.1.8 that came with Potato.
When I plug this in the following error appears on tty1: INIT: Id "S" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes. The "S" entry in /etc/inittab reads: S:12345:respawn:/sbin/getty ttyS0 The cardmodem seems to work at ttyS1, which is the first free port after the build in ttyS0. So what is this error about and how do I get rid of it? Any help and hints appreciated. Hans The following is to get things of my chest, so you can skip it if you like. I bought my notebook one year ago with cardmodem, ethernet card and later on scsi card. I installed slink, but because of a major relocation I didn't use it much. After settling I put KDE on, but the modem wouldn't work: pppd always died unexpectedly. I only found out that the network programs package from KDE messed something up after I installed Corel Linux on another machine and got the same problem. Mind you, I never used kppp, just pppconfig. I ditched KDE, then the modem worked only very sloooowly (9600 kbps). I found a shop who loaned me a fresh modem card and things worked, so threw away the old card and put in the new. That was nine months after I bought the notebook and spending countless days and nights tweaking with config files, re-installing Linux and pcmcia support and mailing with countless people. Over the summer I didn't do anything, just running Windows, but now that Potato is out I thought I'd give it a try again. The error described above was the result. I tried the latest driver for the build in Lucent modem from the Linmodem.org page and it works, but then again, yesterday it didn't. Same with the cardmodem: then it works, then it don't. Why? I'm never sure why. In this year the ethernet card has worked like a charm, never giving me any problems. I haven't used the scsi card much, only under Windows. It is very frustrating that I don't feel I have a stable system; I would have switched from Windows to Linux long ago if it wasn't for this modem thing that keeps messing up. Part of the reason is that there is no good modem diagnostics tool, part that pon/poff doesn't give much support, part that the cardmodem doesn't make noise, biggest part that the whole setup is so complex: card - pcmcia - ttyS1 - ppp. I usually can find problems by tracing them back from the end to beginning, like you do with electronics, but not so in this case. I'm not a computer geek, can't program, just a guy with some brains who is smart enough to solve problems by trial-n-error, elimination and studying from other people's experience. To me Linux is like a huge jigsaw puzzle and I like to do puzzles. Not to give a wrong impression: I blame everything on myself and I am not one would say "See, linux sucks." It's maybe that I do something wrong, or just don't get it in this case. Maybe someday I'll find the answer. In the meantime my two desktops have been happily running Potato and they will do so for a long time. Anyway, that is off my chest. Hope you didn't mind. Hans --- It's nice to be liked, but better by far to get paid -- Liz Phair
