After six or eight years of (sporadic) attempts to connect to the internet with Linux, I finally made it!  What made the difference?  The USR5637 modem from USRobotics.

See, most modems nowadays don’t contain the full functionality within the modem itself; some of the functionality is in the software – the driver.  These are often called “soft modems” (short for “software modems”) or “Winmodems.”  The software is proprietary, and it isn’t in anyone’s financial interest to write drivers for Linux, so it can be a real headache getting these to work with Linux.  The alternative is what’s known as a “hard modem” (short for “hardware modem”), which contains all of the functionality within the modem itself.  These are usually external modems (attached to, rather than built into, the computer) because they have to be somewhat larger to hold all that they need to hold.

The last time I saw a hard modem, it was huge – larger than a videotape.  I was thinking that this would not be a viable option with a laptop, because it would not be very portable!  I was surprised to find that there are much smaller hardware modems available now.  This particular modem is a little smaller than a stick of butter.  It has a short cord attached, with a USB plug on the end.  The cord keeps it from blocking the adjacent USB port(s), which is a big help.

In Windows (or Mac), it does require a driver.  The driver installed without a glitch on my XP installation.  I didn’t even uninstall my old modem first (which is recommended), and I haven’t had the slightest bit of trouble with it.  After a minute or two to install the driver from the included CD, I just had to tell my dial-up connection to use the new modem instead of the old one, and it dialed up without a hitch!  Once I had confirmed that the modem was working well with my laptop, I moved on to the real challenge: I booted into Linux.

To my immense delight (remember, I have been working at this for over six years!), Linux recognized the modem right away.  No driver is required for a Linux system, as long as it is new enough – kernel 2.4.20 or later.  This includes most recent Linux distributions.  (I am running Ubuntu 8.04, a.k.a. “Hardy Heron.”)  I did have a little bit of difficulty with ppp not wanting to allow a USB modem port as an option, but wvdial worked perfectly on the first attempt.  No finagling required. 🙂

All in all, this seems to have been the perfect solution.  It’s compact and, therefore, portable.  It doesn’t interfere with any of my other hardware or accessories.  And, most importantly, it plays well with Linux.