Fritz!Card DSL SL PCI card

AVM Fritz!Card DSL SL under Gentoo Linux

Some notes on getting a Fritz!Card DSL SL (PCI ADSL card) to work under Gentoo Linux. Some of the notes may be useful for installing on other distros. Note: for this card the AVM "PCI" and "DSL" drivers are no use, you need the "DSL SL" one (I tried them !).

As far as I can see SuSE is the only Linux distribution officially supported: if you have SUSE 8.2 you can use the AVM download file (see below) and from 9.0 onwards you can setup the DSL SL card through YaST.

Purity alert: if such things worry you: "Warning: loading fcdslsl.o will taint the kernel: non-GPL license - Proprietary".

Requirements

It does not matter whether you have an ISDN or analogue (T-Net in Germany) phone line: the software and setup are the same.

Hardware: Fritz!Card DSL SL pci card !!

Software: Whatever your distro you need this installed:


UPDATE: Upgrade from kernel 2.4.26 to 2.6.9 (13/01/2005)

After much fiddling around I got the following approach to work, only then did I notice that there is now an fcdsl ebuild available in Portage that covers all current AVM Fritz!cards, but only for 2.6 series kernels. So I wrote a clean page here.

UPDATE: Upgrade from kernel 2.4.20 to 2.4.26 (03/01/2005)

Broke the build of fcdslsl :-(

defs.h:85: redefinition of `irqreturn_t' /lib/modules/2.4.26-gentoo-r9/build/include/linux/interrupt.h:16: `irqreturn_t' previously declared here

This is true: sometime between 2.4.20 and 2.4.26 this kernel header changed: if you just remove the line from fcdslsl-03.11.02/fritz/src.drv/defs.h then it builds and runs OK for me :-)


What I have


Steps

The main set of instructions that I used where Dokumentation: Wie richte ich meine Fritz!Card DSL ein? (on the Gentoo/German forums)

You can go as far as "capiinit start" even before your DSL connection has enabled by D-Telekom, in which case you when you run "drdsl -n" you will get the error something like "ERROR: DSL-Controller 1 is not synced!". When you are connected you can continue !!

1: Configure and build kernel

As per Gentoo instructions (although it took me some time of hunting around on the menus to find the options (some options only appear when you have selected other options already and others seem to appear if you restart the menu !! (I have never been able to reproduce a problem well enough to file a bug - I just save my old .config, hack around and keep checking my new .config and diff-ing it with the old one !!))).

2: Get and build CAPI2.0-driver for card (fcdslsl)

The Gentoo instructions are for the Fritz!Card DSL card and also the URL for fcdsl.tar.gz is currently broken: if you have a DSL card try fcdsl CVS has the files for DSL cards - get the ebuild and all the files under "files" and put them in your local portage directory, as per Gentoo instructions. (I assume the broken-linked tarball is just these files packed up.)

This is the ebuild that I hacked from the fcdsl one fcdslsl-03.11.02.tar.gz. Use it at your peril !!

(I guess you can hacking around in a similar way to create an ebuild for any another AVM driver that you can see under ftp://ftp.avm.de/cardware/fritzcrd.dsl_sl/linux to pull in the correct "<card>suse.n.m....tar.tz)

3: Get and build capi4linux

When I was installing my card "capi4k-utils-20021026" was the default version for Gentoo but this does not support the DSL SL card (when I ran "capiinit start" I got this message in the system log: "kcapi: driver "fcdslsl" has no add card function").

But with the masked build "capi4k-utils-20030616" "capiinit start" worked OK.

> ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge -pv capi4k-utils

4: Get and build pppd

As per Gentoo instructions (if you do not have it installed already).

5: Start CAPI and try to sync with the Telekom exchange

As per Gentoo instructions.

Checking it works: "capiinit start" and check the system log files. And on my setup "lsmod" includes fcdslsl, capi, capifs, kernelcapi, capiutil.

Remember that the module options file to update is "/etc/modules.d/fcdslsl"

6: Setup pppd

As per Gentoo instructions. When setting you user name be sure that you include the full name supplied by your ISP i.e. "<isp><nnnn-nnn>@online.de".

"netstat -i" will include ppp0.

If you are having pppd problems then add "debug" to your pppd setup (eg in /etc/ppp/peers/1und1), try again and watch the system logs.

7: Tidying up

capi4k-utils-20021026 installs to /sbin and capi4k-utils-20030616 (masked at the moment (June 2004)) to /usr/sbin so correct /etc/init.d/capi before adding it to your Gentoo startup (paths are hardcoded in the scripts).


Other Useful Links

Fritz!card DSL - mini-howto (in German) (updated 15/1/05)

AVM Fritz!card DSL SL service Portal Lots of links to drivers, FAQs, links pages... (in German).

ftp://ftp.avm.de/cardware/fritzcrd.dsl_sl/linux dig down for the SuSE Linux driver of any AVM card.

fcdsl CVS The source of the fcdsl ebuild that I mod-ed for fcdslsl:


TO DO


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