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:
- correctly configured kernel
- fcdslsl (CAPI2.0-driver for this card)
- capi4linux(CAPI2.0 plug-in for pppd)
- pppd
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
- I live in Darmstadt, Germany so a lot of this info will only be
relevant to German ISPs and Deutsche-Telekom.
- Old, basic PC: Celeron 433 MHz, 160Mb RAM...
- Gentoo 1.4 + some updates and additions (incl. kernel 2.4.20 "gentoo-sources")
- DSL card = AVM Fritz!Card DSL SL (PCI card) (free from GMX)
- ISP = GMX (1Gb per month for free !!)
- Phone line = T-Net, i.e. analogue, NOT ISDN
- Only a little German: lots of the info I found on the web was in
German (not suprising as ISP issues tend to be national) !! But my
German is not good enough to write this article in German.
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
- Pass ebuild onto Gentoo (and correct header?).
- ? raise Gentoo bug report and solution.
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