May 20, 2002

The informtion on this page was provided by Steve Romero and was originally posted to the Yahoo FX210 forum. Thank you Steve for letting me republish this here.

The question here is not so much is the modem an HSF or AMBIT modem but
rather that the modem isn't a PCI modem. Its an AC modem also known as
an AMR modem and more recently a CND modem. That's the rub, if you look
at the Conexant drivers carefully you will see that device 1106:3068 is
not supported. These numbers identify the modem controller at least in
my VAIO (FX-215) and I suspect all Sony VAIO FX series with VIA chip
sets and non-INTEL CPU's. You can further verify the fact that the
Conexant drivers will not work by running the "list_app_linux"
application that can be downloaded from the Conexant site and it will
provide the following result;

=============================================================
= RESULT OF MODEM QUERY =
=============================================================

ATTENTION: No Conexant PCI modem was found.
The utility detected an AC-link modem on your system.
Currently Conexant Linux modem driver does not support
this Vendor platform.

Therefore what we have are two problems; one, that any modem driver for
Linux must support device id 1106:3068 and two, the driver must support
an AMR device. To date I have found only one driver that claims support
for VIA AMR modems;

http://www.medres.ch/~jstifter/pctel/

Latest driver:

* pctel-0.9.0.tar.gz - [1.3MB] driver for kernel 2.4.x, should
support Via, Asus, CM8x, Sis, PCT and AMR based modems. This driver is
new and may contain some bugs. However, support for AMR / MR based
modems should work. Please read the INSTALL, README and FAQ and follow
the instructions.

However I have not been able to make this work for me. I am able to
build the modules and install them but when I attempt to use the modem,
e.g. access the modem via mini-com, my computer will crash, real ugly I
might add, and attempt to reboot. I say attempt to reboot as I have
never been able to soft reboot this computer using Linux it simply hangs
after the Sony display.

Now having said all of this there do seem to be some people that have
been able to successfully build, install, and use this driver. But it
seems, at least as far as I can tell that only Intel based systems have
been successful.

Where does this leave the rest of us, well right back where we started
from searching for a driver that will allow us to use the built in
modem. I suggest that anyone using Linux on the Sony computers listed
on this site download the pctel-0.9.0 drivers and give them a try
perhaps you will have better luck than I did.

I hope that this helps to clear up some of the confusion surrounding
Linux and the internal modems in the AMD FX based Vaio's that we have.