Today I called my new phone company, Íslandssími, to ask if they had activated my ADSL line yet. They said yes, so I've been spending the evening trying to get the GreatSpeed PCI ADSL modem they sold me to work in my Linux box. So far so good - I'm posting this via. my brand new 512Kb/s (down, up is 256Kb/s) ADSL connection. :-)

One of the nice techies at Íslandssími suggested I look for drivers on this page in New Zealand, and told me that my GreatSpeed modem was using an ITeX chipset. Sure enough there I found some binary drivers for Linux kernels 2.4.2 and 2.4.16. I didn't actually expect these to work, since I'm running SuSE Linux 8.0 and the default 2.4.18 kernel.

To my surprise the 'insmod -f ...' command as described in the ITeX manuals seemed to work - the module installed itself into the kernel, and when I picked up the phone I could hear the hum of an active ADSL connection.

What took the most time was figuring out how much of the software included in the ITeX packages I actually needed. They included an ATM library, a ppp-over-ethernet daemon, a ppp-over-ATM daemon, some configuration utilities, a 2684 bridge kernel patch, two different drivers and a bunch of well written documentation. Most of the software was open source code collected from off the 'net and modified to work with their chipset - I don't know whether ITeX actually built the package or whether some user did. The documentation implied it was done by ITeX, which is relatively impressive. I did wonder whether distributing all that open source stuff with their closed source drivers is permitted by the respective packages licenses or not...

Anyway, after much head scratching I came to the conclusion that I didn't need any of that stuff. Íslandssími uses PPP over ATM, and SuSE 8.0 comes with a whole bunch of PPP over ATM stuff preinstalled - all of it newer than the stuff in the ITeX packages. All I needed was the driver itself (itex1577-2.4.16.o), a working PPP peer defintion file and a username/password line in the /etc/ppp/pap-secrets file.

Once I had those three things configured, I could start up my ADSL connection by simply giving the commands:

insmod -k -f /path/to/itex1577-2.4.16.o
pppd call adsl

Sweet! :-)

I'm glad I got this to work. I much prefer internal modems to external ones, when they work. No cables, no mess - all nice and tidy. But only time will tell how stable this configuration is. If it makes my machine unstable I may give in and buy an external router sometime in the future. We'll see.

Until then I'm going to enjoy high speed internet access and stupid experiments like trying to connect simultaniously via. modem and ADSL... ;-)