SDB: PCMCIA: Modem or serial device does not respond

PCMCIA: Modem or serial device does not respond

Support knowledgebase (pcmcia_serial)

Applies to

SuSE Linux: Versions since 6.3

Symptom:

Using the modem on your pcmcia card does not work. You get either the error message Input/output error or when using eg. wvdial or minicom the modem just doesn't respond. Perhaps you had some success with setting irq=0 (polling) with setserial, but got only a slow connection.

Cause:

At the moment we don't know the intrinsic cause, but it depends at least on how the serial module has been loaded. Loading this module via kmod (to be rekognized by the output (autoclean) of lsmod) causes this error. In the startscript /sbin/init.d/serial the command setserial is used, which leads to the loading by kmod.

Solution:

There are three Alternatives:

If you didn't change the script /sbin/init.d/serial till now, you won't really need it. The default action of that script is to show the available serial port at boottime. So you easily can remove the following links:
```
/sbin/init.d/rc1.d/K50serial
/sbin/init.d/rc1.d/S02serial
/sbin/init.d/rc2.d/K50serial
/sbin/init.d/rc2.d/S02serial
/sbin/init.d/rc3.d/K50serial
/sbin/init.d/rc3.d/S02serial
```
If you need /sbin/init.d/serial really (ie. you modified it to your needs) you can call modprobe serial at the beginnig of the start section of the script.
Last not least you can compile your kernel with build in serial support. With this there are two important points:
- You have to remove the module serial.o from /lib/modules/2.2.5/misc/. Have a look at http://www.suse.de/Support/sdb/en/sf_seriell.html.
- We can not grant installation support for self compiled kernel. So if you aren't experienced in compiling the kernel, please prefer one of the possibilities 1) or 2).

Keywords: PCMCIA, SETSERIAL, MODEM, INTERRUPT

Categories: Hardware

SDB-pcmcia_serial, Copyright SuSE Linux AG, Nürnberg, Germany - Version: 10. Jun 1999
SuSE Linux AG - Last generated: 10. Mai 2002 by zoz (sdb_gen 1.40.0)