[Nelug] Speedtouch USB modem

[Martin Ward]

I downloaded and installed Gentoo yesterday and it managed to drive
the modem. Further testing revealed the source of the problem (I believe):

If you plug in the modem while the speedtch kernel module is active,
then it will not work whatever you do. Adding speedtch
to /etc/hotplug/blacklist and doing "rmmod speedtch" is *not* sufficient:
you also have to reboot the machine! If you can stop the speedtch
module from loading at all, then the modem will work.

I'm not used to having to reboot a Linux box to fix a problem!

Someone once described installing Gentoo like this:
"The Gentoo install was like finding a forest, cutting down the trees, 
breaking a leg, getting out of the hospital, coming back, taking out the 
stumps and clearing the land of rocks, planting wheat, building a mill, making 
flour, making dough, then building an oven in which to burn it to a crisp, 
stealing a cow, milking it, churning the butter, picking berries, making jam. 
YUMMY! Breakfast is ready, but you don't have time to eat because it's time to 
update everything, including GCC, which also means a complete recompilation of 
everything."

My experience of installing Gentoo was similar: I would say it's like filling
in an incomprehensible tax form with instructions like "Take the amount
you wrote in box 234b, Section 343, Subsection 54/b/Q and add it to
the figure you wrote in box 94q. Section 123, Subsection 54/t/p.
Copy the result to boxes ..." ad nauseum.

For example, on the initial setup I got the ethernet to work by telling it
the IP address, netmask, broadcast address etc.
Doesn't it know that the netmask for a 192.168.X.X address is 255.255.255.0?
After the first reboot, the network didn't work at all. I had to hunt around
in /proc to find the ethernet card, enable the appropriate driver in
the kernel, recompile the kernel, add an alias to /etc/modules.d/aliases,
run modules-update and reboot.

Then sshd wasn't installed (even though I had already got it running
for the install!). So I had to run "emerge sshd", and "/etc/init.d/sshd start"
and "rc-update add sshd default" just to log in!

Shouldn't the computer do all this tedious error-prone clerical work?
Its what they are best at!

Let the flames begin! :-)

-- 
			Martin

Martin.Ward at durham.ac.uk http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/ Erdos number: 4
G.K.Chesterton web site: http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/