Comment 55 for bug 375148

Actually I don't think there's a reason to test the old version of
sl-modem, since according to Roland's experiment, /dev/ttySL0 did get
created when he used sl-modem version that's in karmic
(2.9.11~20080817-3ubuntu2).

As for the reason why DKMS build failed with him, is that dkms script in
sl-modem uses bash commands (pushd/popd) which worked in Jaunty, yet the
dkms version in karmic had this change in Aug 21st:

    - When possible, run builds as the 'nobody' user rather than root.

since the default shell of 'nobody' is dash, hence those commands
failed. (Thanks for Mario Limonciello for the tip on this one)

Yet I don't understand why it worked for him two days ago, then failed
yesterday !

Anyways, when Roland installed the slamr module using module-assistant,
/dev/ttySL0 did get created, then when he restarted it vanished. Which
makes me again suspect that this behaviour is because of Ubuntu's policy
of not having static devices in /dev, so when he rebooted the static
/dev/slamr0 device, that was created during install of
sl-modem-modules-$KVER (that resulted from module-assistant), got
removed at reboot.

If someone is willing to experiment wether what I said is true or not,
please install sl-modem modules using module-assistant, then if
/dev/ttySL0 did get created, and then disappear again after reboot, try
running:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure sl-modem-modules-$(uname -r)

Unfortanely, I don't always have a laptop with smartlink modem chip
under my hands. That's why I ask those who are suffering the bug to
help.

--
 ‎أحمد المحمودي (Ahmed El-Mahmoudy)
  Digital design engineer
 GPG KeyID: 0xEDDDA1B7 (@ subkeys.pgp.net)
 GPG Fingerprint: 8206 A196 2084 7E6D 0DF8 B176 BC19 6A94 EDDD A1B7