I just installed a modem in my RH9.0 linux machine and got it working almost without a hitch. I'm pretty impressed at how quickly it went. However, I didn't understand exactly what all was going on as a lot of it was automated and whatnot. Therefore, I have a couple general questions that this experience brought to mind...

1. When I installed the software for the modem, it installed the driver for it and associated it with the correct hardware. How would I go about doing this manually? In other words, how can you change/add/remove a driver for a given device?

2. How can you determine which file in the /dev directory represents the device you are looking for? And, inversely, how can you find which device a given file in the /dev directory represents (if any)?

3. Once the modem has made a connection to some other host (an ISP in my case), it then has a new alias in the networking scheme (ppp0 in my case). How is this determined? Can it be set manually? What exactly is the difference between the name ppp0 and the /dev/modem file?


Thanks in advance.

1. I guess most of the "drivers" you use for devices are kernel modules, that are installed into the kernel (possibly at run time with modprobe). they can be added via

modprobe <modulename>
-OR-
insmod <modulename>

and removed with

rmmod <modulename>

to/from a running kernel. the other chance is that they are built in the kernel, so they're there all the time and this is useless.

2. you basically can't there are some rules, but they don't always be like that...like harddsik partitions are represented by the name hdaX where X is the number of the partition; hda1, hda2, hda3 and so on. tty's are one type of devices, and so on..the numbers after the names depend on how many devices of the same kind are plugged in and so on..but this thing is, too, changing all the time (devfs changing to udev or what was it called and that way...)

3. the /dev/modem represents your modem device. ppp0 means a point-to-point-protocol (ppp) link number 0 (zero), the first one you have opened. it's the way the connection is made, whereas /dev/modem is the device file telling about your modem (hardware)