Wheee

So I’m at my parent’s place in Gurgaon. They have an Airtel DSL connection for Internet access. I brought Fedora Core 4 along to install on my Dad’s laptop, and what I describe here is how I did it. Hopefully it’s useful to someone.

Assumption – you’re using a USB DSL modem provided by Airtel which contains the Conexant Accessrunner chip. Mine says Beetel 100CX on the outside.

• The driver isn’t in the kernel yet, so you need to get the tarball from http://accessrunner.sourceforge.net.
• Decompress this into the kernel source directory (the incomplete tree in /usr/src/kernels/2.6.xx-xx-xx (from the kernel-devel package) will do).
• [Thanks to Arun (yet another one!) for pointing out that this is missing] Enable the modules for these drivers as instructed in the “Configuring kernel build” section here.
• In the top-level kernel directory, do a make M=drivers/usb/atm. Copy cxacru.ko and usbatm.ko to /lib/modules/2.6.xx-xx-xx/drivers/usb/atm.
• Extract the firmware from the Windows drivers as described in http://accessrunner.sourceforge.net/firmware.shtml (I got the utils directory from CVS, did a make and then ran it on the [WINDOWS_DIR]\system32\drivers\CnxEtU.sys
• Copy the extracted firmware to /lib/firmware/cxacru-fw.bin
• That’s the driver setup – when you plug in the USB modem, hotplug should pick up the correct kernel moduel and firmware. Any issues, run dmesg.
• Use the Network config GUI to set up a new xDSL connection using some ethX device or the other. Edit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-[name_of_connection] and remove the ETH= line. Add 3 lines: LINUX_PLUGIN=pppoatm.so VPI=1 VCI=32 Note that the VPI and VCI settings might vary for you. These work for Airtel in Gurgaon and Chennai, apparently.
• That’s about it – you can fire off the connection using /sbin/ifup [connection_name] and down using /sbin/ifdown [connection_name]. Or use the GUI. The Modem Lights Applet doesn’t work with this yet.
• Pay me a consultation fee. *Wink*

Too lazy to fix typos. Off to gloat to myself now. :)