Ok, I've got a bit further. I got into that PDF file at last. I've being trying to use set serial the way it says for the last half an hour. the line that I'm using is: setserial ttys2 uart 16550A irq 5 port 0xd400 thats giving me an error ttys2: input/output error. I've tried putting different numbers between 0 and 6 after ttys but no difference. I've found two numbers at the port/I/O line one was 0xd400 and the other was 0xd407. I've tried both of these with still no affect. The other part of the line is uart 16550A. I have no idea what thats about, I'm just taking that one from the document. I've put the readme at the end of this mail, hopefully someone could shed some light on it. I thought at first that I had to edit the pci file located in the /proc directory but I noticed thanks to pico that its read only. There are lines in the read me that aren't found in the pci file. Could this be the problem? The lines are "Vender id=151f. Device id=0." and "medium devsel." After that it goes onto the IRQ. There is a line before which says modem rev=0 or something like that, that wasn't mentioned in the read me but I surmise that this is because it isn't relivent? Readme follows: With Internal Modem: 4.4.1 Manual mode: 1. Find file pci from path / proc, then use vi editor to find Topic vender ID "151f" and the I/O-address, IRQ-number that Linux assigns to Topic modem. For example : cd / proc vi pci --------------------------------------- Vendor id=151f. Device id=0. Medium devsel. IRQ=5. I/O at 0xe400 [0xe401]. (Then type q to quit vi) 2. Under path / dev, type setserial tty-number uart 16550A irq IRQ-number port I/O-address For example: setserial ttyS2 uart 16550A irq 5 port 0xe400 3. Under path / dev, firstly, remove the default settings that the modem may linked to, and then link the modem to the tty that you assign on step 2. For example: rm modem 1n -s ttyS2 modem 4. Now, you can use minicom to test the modem and type ATI3 to check the type of this modem. For example : minicom ---------------- ATI3 4.4.2 Automatic Mode 1. Copy topic.modem executable file to / bin 2. Copy script file rc.serial to /etc/rc.d 3. When you start Linux again, you may see the message of " Setup topic modem." and it means working properly. If not, you can type topic.modem TOPIC chipset User's Guide 33 directly. 4. You can use minicom to test the modem. Thanks again Darragh