Ok I have established the fact that I have a USR56k fax modem and that it is PnP np. Linux Mandrake is telling me that it detects USR 5610(when it is 2976)whatever thats fine too. Tells me to go to the winmodem section of a site which it directs me to, also fine. The site tells me that my modem is supported. I have searched every website and read a ton of stuff tried many things and it will still not work. Error messages include "modem busy"."cant find modem"' "cant open modem" I have tried all the files /dev/modem and the like to no avail.
I dont like to post at all cause I always try to find my own answers.
Sorry for the long post mods,

>>>I am at the end of my rope can I make this work or better off buying an external modem?

So where are you trying to dial out? Like with Kppp, or out of the terminal? As far as I know, "modem busy" usually means that you might have two serial drivers present when there should be one. One driver in the kernel and one as a module. What distro are you using?
It might also mean that there is really no serial port there, or it is using the incorrect IRQ address. Did you check if the /dev/modem is linked to the correct ttysx.

Let us know.

Drew

First, go to http://www.idir.net/~gromitkc/winmodem.html and confirm that your modem is in fact not a winmodem. If it is a winmodem, good luck. I've been told that some work under linux (linmodems), others do not, but you are probably better off just getting one that you know will work. Also try going to your console and type
setserial -g /dev/ttys* you shoud see results for each serial port showing the UART type, port#, and IRQ. If your computer has 2 built-in serial ports (most do), then check to see if there are jumpers to manually set the port and IRQ on you modem. If there are, set the jumpers to use COM2 and IRQ4 (assuming this will not conflict with another device on your system) reinstall the modem and check that your BIOS understands not to use PnP for that slot and that you do not have a PnP OS. Run Linux and test the modem using the terminal and AT commands, or just query it. This worked for me. But I can't stress enough that the biggest thing is to make sure that your modem is not a winmodem, if it is not, you should be able to use jumpers to set the COM and IRQ. Good Luck.

neovox