I am getting a little farther. I'm not sure how to follow these directions though. I do sudo slmodemd -c USA --alsa hw:0,6 I get this error: ALSA support is not compiled in (see README for howto). When I check into the readme it says: ALSA has the built-in modem drivers included in 'alsa-driver' >= 1.0.2 and in Linux kernel >= 2.6.5. Currently there is 'intel8x0m' (snd-intel8x0m) modem driver, which supports ICH based AC97 modems (MC97). Recent 'alsa-driver' (>=1.0.8) has also support for NVidia NForce, SiS 630 (snd-intel8x0m), VIA686 (snd-via82xx-modem) and ATI IXP (snd-atiixp-modem) based modems. 1. Configure your kernel and enable ALSA and ICH based modem support ( 'Device Drivers' -> 'Sound' -> 'Advanced Linux Sound Architecture' -> 'PCI devices' -> 'Intel i8x0/MX440; AMD768/8111 modems' ) . 2. Build and install kernel and modules as usual (make , make modules_install, etc.). ICH modem driver modem module name is 'snd-intel8x0m' (if was configured as module). 3. Build application 'slmodemd' with ALSA support. For this in slmodem-2.9.x dir: $ cd modem $ make SUPPORT_ALSA=1 This will build 'slmodemd' with ALSA support. If compilation is failed review Makefile (near ALSA_SUPPORT condition) and define right library and/or CFLAGS . Note: For above you need ALSA library and header files installed. I'm running Ubuntu 8.0.4 and am pretty sure that this won't work. I tried to do make SUPPORT_ALSA=1 and it failed (but I didn't/couldn't follow the above directions). I'm also not sure what the below means to me: Low level driver code is included in the snd-hda-intel driver. The non-driver slmodemd has the Smart COMM functions