The installer should set up a winmodem if it is present

[Aaron Whitehouse]

Apologies if I have put this against the wrong package, please feel free to reassign it.

After reading https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DialupModemHowto?highlight=%28modem%29 it seems that setting up a winmodem (being the majority of modems) is a power-user operation involving downloading (anyone see a problem here?), manual detection etc.

I appreciate that a lot of people now use network Internet, but it is still affecting a lot of users. It looks pretty bad that such old technology isn't well handled. From memory it worked well in Mandrake 9.

I am an avid Ubuntu fan, but the effort involved in sorting my modem means that I will likely go back to Windows until my ADSL is up and running.

It would be great if the modem could be set up in the same way that networking is set up at install. My IPW2200 was detected automatically, the drivers were installed and it 'Just Worked' by the time I got to the desktop. Is there a reason that the install couldn't use ScanModem (or whatever) to find the port it is on (and map it to /dev/modem for all the applications to just use automatically) and what type it is and therefore install the drivers?

[Aaron Whitehouse (aaron-whitehouse)]

Actually, on further thought, the modem that worked well in Mandrake was a PCMCIA card and may well have been a full modem and not a silly WinModem.

[Aaron Whitehouse (aaron-whitehouse)]

Apparently linuxant.com offers a free 14.4kbps driver with .deb files available. I wonder if some arrangement with them could be made somehow so that the information was presented to the user instead of it all just not working.