hi people !

My sister just got a notebook (presario 1200) and i've installed slackware 8.0 on a small partition i made especially for this matter . Well, i can´t make the modem work and keep getting a "Modem is busy" message on kppp.
I made a small search on the subject and found this among other information that i just couldn't understand , can anyone help?
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17.2 "Modem is busy"
What this means depends on what program sent it. The modem could actually be in use (busy). Another cause reported for the SuSE distribution is that there may be two serial drivers present instead of one. One driver was built into the kernel and the second was a module.

In kppp, this message is sent when an attempt to get/set the serial port "stty" parameters fails. (It's similar to the "Input/output error" one may get when trying to use "stty -F /dev/ttySx"). To get a few of these stty parameters, the true address of the port must be known to the driver. So the driver may have the wrong address. The setserial" command will display what the driver thinks but it's likely wrong in this case. So what the "modem busy" often means is that the serial port (and thus the modem) can't be found.

If you have a pci modem, then use one of these commands: lspci, or cat /proc/pci, or dmesg to find the correct address and irq of the modem's serial port. Then check to see if "setserial" shows the same thing. If not, you need to run a script at boot-time which contains a setserial command that will tell the driver the correct address and irq. The reason that the driver has it wrong may be due to failure of the kernel to understand the lspci data correctly. You might notice this in a boot-time message.

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actually i didn't try it so far

The two most likely problems are:

1. You have the wrong device address for the modem. You can check the address by using minicom to send ATZ to every device /dev/ttyS0 through /dev/ttyS7 and see which device answers OK.

2. The laptop uses a winmodem. In this case I advice that you do a google search to find out how to install that particular modem in Linux. If you have no luck then post the modem name in the Hardware Forum and maybe somebody will know how to make it work.

thanks a lot for your help

On my laptop, the Modem busy message is caused by a conflict between the soundcard (SiS7012) and the modem (a PCTEL thing), haven't got round to doing anything about it yet though.

Cheers