[Asterisk-Users] Is the X100P a WinModem?

[Ethan]

> Unless the card happens to contain a dsp, or interface chip whose
> specifications are public you might as well give up.

True. Especially with the DMCA.

> This is a similar problem to having an ethernet card and a driver, but
> expecting a different card with a different chip on it to just work with
> your driver. (Obviously you totally missed out on this sort of fun in the
> early days of Linux/FreeBSD)

Nope, I remember Yggdrisl Linux, Linux kernel .97, and FreeBSD 2.2.1.

> Having hardware I would say is not even half the battle - whether it is
> commercial or custom, often the designs are based closely on the
> manufacturer's app notes, so designs using the same core chip are often
> interchangable. Having software that makes the hardware work for your
> application is the hard part since often there is no reference design at
> all for this from the manufacturer, let alone one that will work with Linux
> or FreeBSD.

Right, but why reinvent the wheel. If you need a card to do something and
there is something on the market, you can write drivers for it and use it.
There is a fast ethernet card for the Silicon Graphics Indigo^2 that is
made by Phobos. Wait, actually it is an off the shelf 3com EISA fast
ethernet card with Phobos drivers, and a reprogrammed identifier...
because SGI boxes aren't as popular, you end up paying a couple grand for
the driver.

> Over the summer Atheros (makes the radio modules in the dlink and linksys
> wireless stuff) took the groundbreaking step to release a "sort of" open
> source driver for their hardware, but this is not the norm at all. Take
> another example of ATI vs NVidia and compare the driver availability.

Yea I was looking at using the dlink USB radio tuner on a different
project of mine. Speaking of, we are running 10 PCI sound cards in a
single FreeBSD machine... people on here have mentioned this... we use a
PICMG SBC on a backplane with 19 PCI slots. Got two fo them for $125 off
of ebay. So there are solutions for tons of PCI FXO cards, but a channel
bank would be cleaner.

pictures:

http://users.757.org/~ethan/pics/geek/soundcard_champion/

> So in summary, unless you happen to have some pipeline of information
> coming from a winmodem manufacturer, making it into a linmodem let alone
> another specialized telephony device is anything but trivial, unless it
> happens to be based on exactly the same chips and reference designs as the
> software you have is for.

Hmmmm