Device driver installation, /dev/phone*

In brief: get the tar ball from Quicknet's ftp site (http://www.quicknet.net/develop.htm will point you to the latest version), untar it somewhere, and make. If you have an ISA card, the default behaviour of the make is quite appropriate: it compiles and installs the drivers, makes and sets appropriate access on the devices /dev/phone* (as well as removes the old-style devices, /dev/ixj*, no longer used). It will also compile and install the ispnp.o module untarred in a parallel directory tree.

However, if you have a PCI card, or if the BIOS of your computer is such that PnP of the ISA card is not possible, you must bypass the automatic make defaults. The shorthand way is to make ixj-manual as root, but actually I find it instructive to understand what your make is doing. Any steps below involving installation into common directories (make install and make headers-install) require that you acquire appropriate privileges, i.e. become root.

Make the driver itself, without PnP hooks :

  make headers-install
  make ixj-wo-isapnp

and make the device interface

  make phonedev.o

At this point you can install things:

  make install

The drivers will be placed in the proper location in /lib/modules, and the module dependencies automatically adjusted. You still need to insmod them:

  /sbin/modprobe ixj

and if you want these driver modules to be loaded every time you reboot your system, you will need to add the same to your system initialization script, /etc/rc.d/rc.modules in Slackware, or something similar in other distributions.

Quicknet drivers will become part of the standard kernel starting with kernel 2.2.14. If you are using kernel 2.2.14 and above, these drivers are included in the kernel, most of this section does not apply, and at most you will need to uncomment a line in /etc/rc.d/rc.modules.

make install also makes the /dev/phone* entries, with proper permissions, but it does that by calling a separate shell script, phone_dev_create, and if you prefer you can run/rerun it manually, too.

The default access on /dev/phone* is 644, so if you want users to be able to run Voxilla, you may want to change it to 666, or o+w.

For testing purposes, Quicknet provides the sample source code for a few simple tools, in a samples subdirectory.

  cd samples
  make
  ./ring

will compile a few sample programs, and use one of them, a ring generator, to test your installation. Plug a telephone set into your Quicknet card; if it rings, you are in good shape.

Pick up the phone, it's for you!