How to get faxmodem to work?

[brvcf]

Trying to use Efax with Efax-GTK GUI.
can not figure out what the serial device (modem) is.

Have read other threads on this subject. No luck and/or not applicable.
I have a "dial-up" modem in my old Dell E521

The actual hardware is listed by lspci:

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04:09.0 Communication controller: Conexant Systems, Inc. HSF 56k Data/Fax Modem

Driver Manager does not give list the modem so my first assumption would is that Mint would be using an open-source driver.

but I get the following info from dmsg

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dmesg | grep tty
[    0.000000] console [tty0] enabled

I would have expect the modem to be listed as some other "tty" so it appears Mint does not know about the modem as a usable device.

[rene]

That's a so-called software modem; a piece of hardware that does most everything other than driving actual electrical lines on the wire in software rather than hardware including (potentially) presenting a serial port interface. In this, "software" equals "the Windows driver". There's been valiant attempts at reverse engineering latter but this subject is now completely and fully historic.

I'd be surprised if you could get it going with a modern kernel, in which "modern" is anything more recent than a 2.6 series kernel, i.e., 10+ years ago. If you'd insist on trying you'd start at https://www.linuxant.com/drivers/hsf/install.php --- but I would also note that Conexant not supporting Linux in any shape or form was together with their "hardware" being anything but hardware historically enough reason for most Linux users to not bother with them in the first place,

If you are doing more than playing and were using a system providing an actual external serial port (which I guess you are not) I'd really advise grabbing an external serial modem, i.e., a real one. Doubt you'll still be able to do anything with that bit of non-hardware that you currently have. Maybe USB hardware modems exist? No idea...

[brvcf]

Thanks.

Tried info/drivers at Linuxant. No easy solution. Might be possible to with a lot of work.Definitely would be a 'learning experience." Probably not with the time.

Been so long since I have had to deal with a modem I kind of forgot the hardware modem/winmodem issues. I have some old hardware modems but this system doesn't have a real serial port. I might see if a USB serial port and hardware modem can be made to work.

[Pierre]

in order to achieve this scenario:
- - you do need to avoid any WinModems - - as they use the CPU in an Windows system,
to actually 'run' the modem itself .. thus they were much cheaper to purchase.

rather, you should get the later usb modems, that were not WinModem based,
& thus they had their own inbuilt modem-controller within them.

as this in an "dial-up" modem that inbuilt, into that Dell machine .. it could be of either type modem,
and that www.linuxant.com/ does seem to be the most suggested goto site.

[lsemmens]

As an alternative, many MFPs also support fax functions, that might be an alternative.