Fritz!Card DSL SL PCI card

AVM Fritz!Card DSL SL under Gentoo Linux 2.6.9 and 2.6.14

Some notes on getting Fritz!Card DSL SL (a PCI ADSL card) to work under Gentoo Linux.

It is now (Jan 2005) much easier than it used to be under Gentoo, but only if you run a 2.6 Kernel !! (this is my 2.4 page.) The same instructions apply for all AVM Fritz!cards (DSL, DSL2, DSL SL, USBs) (driver modules fcdsl fcdsl2 fcdslsl fcdslusb fcdslslusb).

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 type PCI or USB card and standard "Splitter".

Software: Whatever your distro you need this installed:


What I have


UPDATE: Upgrade from kernel 2.6.9 to 2.6.14 (02/12/2005)

I used my kernel config from 2.6.9 but dropped some options to now leave these for ISDN, CAPI and PPP:
CONFIG_ISDN=m
CONFIG_ISDN_CAPI=m
CONFIG_ISDN_CAPI_MIDDLEWARE=y
CONFIG_ISDN_CAPI_CAPI20=m
CONFIG_ISDN_CAPI_CAPIFS_BOOL=y
CONFIG_ISDN_CAPI_CAPIFS=m
CONFIG_PPP=m
CONFIG_PPP_ASYNC=m
CONFIG_PPP_SYNC_TTY=m
CONFIG_PPP_DEFLATE=m
CONFIG_PPP_BSDCOMP=m
And re-emerge fcdsl. This replaced fcdsl-2.6.20.7 with fcdsl-2.6.30 and noted that drdsl is now a separate ebuild. I did not use drdsl, or change capi.conf and it worked first time after the reboot.

Steps to upgrade from 2.4.20 to 2.6.9

1: Configure and build kernel

I used my kernel config from my 2.4.20 setup. This what I have, although some may be superfluous !
CONFIG_ISDN=m
CONFIG_ISDN_CAPI=m
CONFIG_ISDN_CAPI_MIDDLEWARE=y
CONFIG_ISDN_CAPI_CAPI20=m
CONFIG_ISDN_CAPI_CAPIFS_BOOL=y
CONFIG_ISDN_CAPI_CAPIFS=m
CONFIG_PPP=m
CONFIG_PPP_MULTILINK=y
CONFIG_PPP_FILTER=y
CONFIG_PPP_ASYNC=m
CONFIG_PPP_SYNC_TTY=m
CONFIG_PPP_DEFLATE=m
CONFIG_PPP_BSDCOMP=m
CONFIG_PPPOE=m

2: Get and build capi4linux

For a 2.6 kernel you need to emerge capi4k-utils-20041006. This will also emerge pppd if a new one is required.

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

Much easier now, but prefix the emerge with the driver you need e.g.
FCDSL_CARDS=fcdslsl emerge fcdsl
(for info for non-Gentoo users it essentially builds using avm_fcdsl-2.6-20.7.src.rpm from the AVM website.

4: Configure

Follow the instructions at the end of the fcdslsl emerge !! FYI my working setup has these modules loaded:
ppp_synctty
ppp_generic
fcdslsl
capi
capifs
kernelcapi

(I can see that not all the PPP modules should necessarily be loaded, but it seems that capi20 and capifs are not used !!).

And I get loads more messages in the syslog and on the console that I did not get before (some looking like errors). But it all seems to work).

Future kernel rebuilds/updates

Remember: if you update your kernel modules, you may need to re-emerge fcdslsl to re-insert your module into /lib/modules/x. (Followed by an
/sbin/depmod -ae -F System.map ≤kernel version>
and update-modules).

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).

FritzKarte @ LinuxWiki.org (in German)

fcdslsl-kernel-2.6 Fritzcard DSL SL with Kernel 2.6 HOWTO (in German).


SUSE 9.1

In theory it should have been easy to set this up: SUSE fully support AVM cards, but I had problems :-( I think the mistake I made was to try to configure it under YAST as a network card: but it is treated as a type of ISDN card, even though I have an analogue line. (But I did not do a clean re-install to test this theory.)

Kubuntu 5.10

TO COME (worked fine).
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