Installation of Longshine LCS-8051A ISDN card

This describes how to install the Longshine LCS-8051A ISDN card under Ubuntu Gutsy (in this case: from the LiveCD) so you can go online with it. Fortunately all necessary software is available from the CD (so no internet connection is required to set up internet connection )

Steps

I assume that the card (the hardware) is correctly installed in the computer and has an ISDN cable plugged in, and the computer is booted with Ubuntu Gutsy.

The LCS-8051A card is recognized by the hisax driver which is included with Gutsy. The driver has to be loaded with specific options so it finds the card (these options are also described in the manual (http://www.longshine.de/longshine/products/modem/8051A/8051A-manual_eng.pdf) in the "For Linux" section). Note that as the hisax driver seems to get loaded automatically, it has to be unloaded first.

sudo rmmod hisax
sudo modprobe hisax id=HiSax type=35 protocol=2

The "id=HiSax type=35 protocol=2" thing is the magic stuff that makes hisax find this specific card model.

Then the software has to be installed:

apt-get install isdnutils-base ipppd

During ipppd installation you will be asked for your internet account details: the dial-in number of your provider, your user name, and your password (if you don't have an account, you can use call-by-call numbers; for example, http://www.onlinekosten.de/isdn/ibc_vergleich (german) has a list of these numbers and associated costs).

Now everything should be ready for connection, so start the dial-in:

isdnctrl dial ippp0

By default, the connection will be closed if it stays idle for a while (AFAIK 60 seconds).

Missing things

• network-manager integration (currently nm-applet will show the "no connection" icon even though we are connected")
• better integration of the idle-timeout (automatic redial-on-demand would be nice for that)