[Mageia-discuss] Wish List

[André Machado]

> With laptops it's unfortunately not the users' choice, unless the user adds
> an external modem in addition to the in-built winmodem (which wouldn't be
> ideal), so I agree, support for winmodem would be still very useful.

Not only laptops. Many lay users buy magazine PCs that come with this
winmodens and don't know differences behind them and a hardmodem.

Also, I've seen bizarre things, like distros where the dialer is not installed
and you need to download it from Internet. But how the user will download the
dialer if the Internet does not work? No! Dial-up dialer should come installed
as default.

Some softmodens are supported, such like these models:

http://wiki.debian.org/slmodem [Sorry, Mandriva link is too long]

But the point is that the most, like PCTel, Lucent and Motorolla, has licenses
that restrict distribution - so include these drivers on Mageia can be illegal
- and some drivers requires compile a kernel module to work - what not aways
works. To lay user, can be very difficult compile and load a kernel module. So,
we must pay close attention to this bit detail. Too many users what doesn't use
Linux can begin to use it if the distro has this support. Too many of them still
with a dual boot Win-Linux because of this.