My brother's ancient 1996 PC needed to be replaced, and this Walmart PC easily meets his needs and actually allows much more multimedia than he expected. He just wants to do e-mail, surf the web, print, and handle digital photos, and he didn't want the expense of DSL. Eventually, however, he went with DSL and the modem issue, described below, became irrelevant.
I added 512 MB more RAM memory (Kingston 533 MHz DDR2 from Memory Suppliers) for 1 GB total, and squeezed the gOS partition down to 10 GB, and installed Kubuntu-7.10 version of Ubuntu in the remaining 68 GB partition. Everything seems to work nicely except for the modem which I replaced with a smarter modem until a driver is available.
Since I live 240 miles away, I set up scripts to do reverse ssh tunnelling from my computer into his so that I can securely administer his computer through his dynamic IP address.
When the scanModem program from Linmodems.org is run on the Walmart TC2502 PC with its stock modem, the ModemData.txt file suggests the "agrsm" driver modules agrserial.ko and agrmodem.ko compiled from agrsm-20070804.tar.gz. Unfortunately, even with those drivers, the wvdialconf program which can be installed in Kubuntu using the Synaptic program (K | System | Adept Manager | wvdial ) is unable to make contact with the modem.
The board identification states:
Agere systems PINBALL P40 AM3: -2 S/N:7720073300Z E87711 94V0
The identification on the main chip states:
AGERE SV92PP M680713T 9274924 with "e3" in an ellipse at the end.
The crystal says "24.576H7G" and another chip says:
AASUPREME P950003M4
Barcode stickers on the back say:
F797331016764R GP 56PAV2 7F9733012701 GP 88105002074 with the 88 in bold print.
and the CE sticker says:
C (some logo) US
E252809
Vin 3.3Vdc I max 50mA
Model NO. Agere PINBALL P40 Modem
US: AGSMD01BPINBALL. This device meets
the requirements of cf47 CFR Part 68.
IC: 4005B-PINBALL
REN: 0.1
Made in China
Last updated: May 10, 2008
