Known Problems and Limitations:
The following are things for me to work on and you to watch out for:
- If you want to dial out (say using PPP) on a your configured voice
modem, the port has to be configured for no monitoring, or you have to quit
BePhoneyd. There is no way for a program to monitor a serial port in the
BeOS and give it up to someone who wants exclusive access (like PPP) yet.
If you want to dial out, use BePhoney to quit BePhoneyd, or configure the
port for no monitoring and restart BePhoneyd. Don't forget to set everything
back when you are done. If anyone knows a good way around this, let me
know. I have reported this into Be's bug database as 971214-131618 and it
is an acknowledged feature
- The Motorola VoiceSurfer 33.6 is not a Rockwell based voice modem and is
not supported. However, the Motorola VoiceSurfer 56k is a Rockwell based
voice modem and is supported. The 33.6 has a strange proprietary voice
interface and I do not plan to add voice support for these modems any time
soon. Let me know if you are interested in this and I will see what I can
do.
- I purchased a cheap Rockwell based 14.4 voice modem to test with. I
cannot get the thing to produce a DTMF after playing a greeting so there may
be no beep before recording your messages. As far as I can tell, this is a
bug on my Rockwell modem and not in BePhoney. If you have a newer Rockwell
modem which has this problem let me know.
- That same Rockwell modem has problems setting the device to the local
phone jack if that phone is already off the hook. So, if you are recording
a greeting or playing a message back on the local phone jack, you need to
leave the phone onhook and pick it up after the modem is set for that device.
Unfortunately, the program gives you no indication when this happens, so just
wait a sec. Let me know if you have a newer Rockwell modem which has this
problem and I will see what I can do about it. I hope this is a bug in my
old modem.
- The ZyXEL 1496 with older ROMs does not support 4-bit ADPCM encoding or
the local phone jack device. The latest ROMs (6.17 at the time of writing
this document) do have support for 4-bit ADPCM. I don't know if there is
support for the local phone jack device in that release however. If not,
the only option at this time for recording your greeting is to use the
microphone port. If you are having problems with this, let me know.
- If your modem doesn't support something like 4-bit ADPCM, the GUI will
assume it does. This can lead to errors coming up saying that it could not
set the encoding or could not set the device. Future releases of BePhoney
will be able to autodetect the modem you are using as well as detect
what feature are supported by your modem. Features your modem does not
have will not be accessible in the UI. If you are having problems
determining what features your voice modem supports, contact me.
- Even though the Copy menu item is enabled for fax windows, it currently
does nothing. I will implement copying a selection from the fax window to
the clipboard soon. There are many ways like saving and drag and drop to
get the fax image into another program
- I had planned on supporting older Class 2 modems (versus the official
Class 2.0 faxmodem standard), however I am having a problem receiving faxes
in this mode. I think it is something with my build of libtiff, but I am
still checking. I hope to have this fixed soon. However, don't expect
the even older Class 1 type faxmodems to ever work
- The printing support is not tested thoroughly. I don't have a printer,
but I did configure a printer on one of my serial ports. When I printed
a four page fax, I could see the data going out on the serial port and
the print driver said it was printing four pages. However, I don't know
if the resulting pages would have been right. Let me know if it works.
- Be currently does not support internal modems on the Intel platform.
So, if you cannot get your modem to work with the Connect application, there
is no way that BePhoney will work with it. Try setting your modem to COM2
using jumpers and see if you can communicate with it using Connect. If you
are still having problems you might have to wait for R4 but at least I should
have 2.0 by then.
Most of these are rather minor and I hope to have solutions to all of these
soon. The only exception to that is the problem related to PPP dial outs
which I don't have a solution to and I think Be would have to implement
something for me. If you find something a bit more serious or just something
annoying, send me some mail.