Went round to Dave's last night to try to help him set up his USB DSL modem under Linux. Dave has SuSE 9.0 Personal, dual-booting with a less free OS, and he just got DSL. His ISP provided him with a Binatone DSL500 modem, which claims to support Linux. Naturally, Dave had tried to set it up in YaST, which successfully recognised it as a USB ADSL modem, even said what make and model it was (although it listed it as the original make, not the Binatone rebadging - but that's fair enough). However, in spite of that, and pretending to configure a PPP interface using it, nothing happened.

The CD that came with the modem had a directory cunningly called Linux on it, in which were a i386 compiled RPM, a source RPM and a README. Dave had, after YaST's failure, installed the binary RPM, but still couldn't figure out how to get it working. He was aware that Binatone said the RPM was for Red Hat, but had hoped it might be OK.

It probably would have been, had it not been for such an old version of RH (7.1) that the kernel module included was compiled with a GCC 2.x compiler, rather then 3.x as used in SuSE 9.0. No problem I thought, I'll just take advantage of the fact they supply a source RPM, and rebuild it for this kernel. Problem is that 9.0 Personal doesn't supply the kernel-source package on the CDs, to save space presumably. rebooted into the less free OS, and downloaded the latest k_athlon/kernel-source packages, saved them somewhere I'd remember, booted Linux and installed them. A quick reboot for the new kernel and I proceeded to install some handy things like make, gcc, etc from the CDs. The package took all of a couple of seconds to build on his Duron, and I installed it. Ran the init.d script provided, and lo and behold, the interface came up. I guess the username and password were stored on the modem by the 'doze driver, because it just came up. rebooted to verify it would do so on boot and yes, it did. Now, I'm going to have to give Dave some insserv headers to pop in the top of that script so SuSEconfig doesn't knacker it, but otherwise, it just worked. Had I had access to the kernel source right from the outset, I could have been done in a matter of minutes.

I left Dave with APT downloading a whole bunch of updates for him, with that modem, the Linux support for which appears to have really just been an after-thought, getting transfer rates of about 50% faster from the same server under Linux than it did under that other, less free, better supported OS.