The Sagem F@st800 modem is a right pain to get working on Debian (and, from what I've read, every other GNU/Linux distribution). It looks like this and is supplied by many UK ADSL ISPs with the cheap broadband services. In my case I was configuring it to work with Tiscali.
I put innumerable hours into getting this going, and didn't find any sets of instructions on the internet which gave the whole story. So I put this together to help any other people trying to make this work, to save them the stress and frustration that I went through!
I was using a fairly clean installation of Debian 3.1r5, with a 2.4.27-speakup kernel. These instructions should work for most versions of Debian. However, when I tried to do this on a 2.6.19 kernel, I couldn't find the headers anywhere, so if this is the case for you then you'll have to patch your kernel to a later version.
This should also work for any of the other Debian-based distributions out there (Ubuntu et al). TBH there's no reason why it shouldn't work for most linux distros, if you replace the Debian-specific stuff (dpkg etc) with the relevant thing for your distro.
I write this assuming the user is fairly competent in a UNIX like environment. If you're not, go and find a guide from somewhere!
You will need the following.
You can find this out by typing uname -r. If you don't have them, obviously you won't be able to download them with apt-get, since presumably the reason you're reading this is that you want to get an internet connection going on your machine! You should be able to find them over at http://packages.debian.org.
Download the .deb file to some form of removable media, then install it with (for example):
$ sudo dpkg -i linux-headers-2.4.27-speakup_2.4.27-1.1sarge4_i386.deb
With luck this will all go to plan. If anything goes wrong, double check that you've got the exact kernel version right.
Again you'll have to download it onto some kind of removable media and then put it into your Debian system somewhere.
$ tar -zxf Fast8x0_3-0-6.tgz $ cd eagle-usb
You'll notice when you unpack it that the actual source is located in an eagle-usb-src subdirectory. Before you make it though, you must apply the Sagem patch with which it is supplied.
$ ./appli_patch
Again, with luck this will all go to plan. Now you can descend into the source directory and do the normal thing. Ignore all the stuff in the debian directory - it didn't work for me, and doing it by hand isn't really any more complicated.
$ cd eagle-usb-src $ ./configure $ make $ sudo make install
If you have the kernel headers installed, this should all work in the normal way. Now connect the modem. A load of text should come up in your terminal (it might not if you're using an xterm. The power light should be on and the ADSL light off.
Now run eagleconfig as root. Choose UK01 from the list (for Tiscali & other UK ISPs; if you're somewhere other than the UK obviously choose the relevant one) and enter your username and password as required. Answer the other questions with your own preferences.
$ sudo eagleconfig
Now the important part. You will get some messages about DSP, uploading to device, etc. Then it will say "Waiting for modem to initialize...". If you look at your modem you should see the ADSL light flash for a few seconds. If it does this then stays on then congratulations, it's working. If (like mine) it doesn't, and goes dark after flashing then don't worry. Press ^C to end eagleconfig.
Run eaglectrl -d as root which will send the same "connect" command to the modem. Again, it may not work first time, but after two or three tries the light should flash then stay on.
$ sudo eaglectrl -d
That's it! Once both modem lights are lit, then you can simply run startadsl (as root) to start your connection.
$ sudo startadsl
Hopefully this worked for you. If not, let me know (email at the bottom of this page) and I can try and help. It'd be nice to hear to hear from any satisfied customers too!
