Floyd L. Davidson <floyd@barrow.com> wrote:
> "Al C." <no.spam.acanton@adams-blake.no.spam.com> wrote:
>>
>>/dev/ttyS1 at 0x02f8 (irq -3) is a 16550A I suppose that means Slack is
>>not even seeing the external modem. What now?
> The problem is probably that the serial port is not enabled.
[..]

> Check the BIOS setup; however, enabling it requires a utility
> from IBM that runs only under Windows.

If this is via the serial port, yes, this is disabled by default. Instead of
via BIOS, there is a small tool distributed by the manufacturer, 'PS2'. By
help of that command-line tool, quite a lot of settings can be changed
(enable the serial port, disable the IR port, switch to another IO-address,
etc.).

Funny enough, this tool did not run with freedos - it needed some MSDOS 6.22
(with that one, one cannot maintain big harddrives any more), or a Win98
boot floppy (which is MSDOS as well).

So, it won't need Winx to enable the serial port. Just keep a floppy around,
or a floppy-image in linux, to be 'dd'-d as needed, for booting to DOS, in
order to maintain some parameters of the 600 with the 'ps2' tool.