So I stayed up till midnight last night, and wonders of wonders,
finally got my modem to work. Turns out that the problem was with COM2;
managed to reset the physical device to use 3E8, IRQ 4 (COM3) and now
everything is (almost) hunky-dory.
Except for the sound. (Isn't it always _something_?) On-board AC'97
audio, works fine in Win98, Linux doesn't recognize it. As far as I've
read, AC'97 is supported, so why doesn't it get detected? In BIOS, should
the "Sound Blaster" option be enabled? I've already enabled on-board audio,
and the settings work fine enough under Win98 (except no sound under
DOS--not a big deal), but I thought that there might be some problem with
that. Furthermore, how do I force Linux to recognize that there is indeed
sound. I skimmed the Sound-HOWTO last night, but (at least to my befuddled
brain) it just assumed that Linux would recognize the audio automatically.
However, when I try to play sounds, or set up a sound daemon, it tells me
that /dev/dsp doesn't exist. ls -l /dev/dsp confirms that the file is
there, so I assume that it just doesn't recognize the hardware.
Now I'm really sorry that the installfest was canceled this month.
Oh, well.
:Peter