Kom is a terminal program for dialup connection via modem written for the K Desktop Environment.
Screen shots (somewhat outdated)
What's new? (zmodem now sends)
Allthough Kom works well as a terminal program over serial line in general, it is intended to be a client for black board systems (BBS) that run on top of DOS or some other operating system that are not able to offer internet services over serial line. So you may connect to other unix boxes using Kom, but that is not recommened. Consider setting up serial line ip in this case.
Please note that this program is in an alpha stage.
Allthough the final release will be intendent to telecommunication newbies also, you should have experiences with modems and black board systems when trying this release.
Currently, Kom supports
Since this covers 90% of the practical uses of this kind of programs, i feel it's ok to release it as an early preview. Don't expect to use it in all-day work. It's full of bugs and half-implemented parts. Please be aware when makeing experiments with this release, that it is an communication device and you meight therefore create troubles to the sysop of your BBS, too.
If you still feel curious, configure the beast and play around with it. The following sections gives some hints how to.
Unpack the archive to any directory of your choice. The shell variables
$KDEDIR
and $QTDIR
should be set as usual to any
KDE program.
Have a brief look into include/local.h
make
All serial line devices are owned by root. They are not accessable to
others. Kom
must therefore be later a s-uid program and
(partially) configured by root. Since i didn't implement the the nessesary
chown(2) stuff yet, you can only use this program
as root or you must chmod o+rw /dev/ttyS2
(or whatever your
modem device is) to get access to your modem device as normal user.
Since it is never a good idea to test strange programs as root, i recommend
the later. Please don't forget to remove global access rights from your modem
device after testing.
Install the vga font. If you allready have a dosemu properly configured for
X11, this should do. Otherwise, copy lib/vga.pcf.Z
into
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc
and run mkfontdir
.
kfm
, open folder Templates
and start
Kom.kom
. Kom should come up then with this default
configuration. Choose File/Configure...
from the menu
and modify the configuration to your needs.
Exit Kom.
Open folderKom
with kfm and create a new modem configuration
using (kfm's) File/New../default.kom
. Name it to your suits.
Start this newly created configuration and enter the dialup parameter for
the box.
Choose Dial
from the menu and enjoy.
File/New../default.kom
.
Note
The phonebook was intended to work by clicking on the configuration. This does not work in the moment, since this feature is obviously broken in kfm (or i'm too stupid to make it working again). Thus you have to drag and drop the phonebook entry (*.kom) onto the program to get the desired line.
Note further, that you have to restart kom after changing the modem parameters. (This will be fixed in one of the next releases)
The offending routine deals with the recognition of data carrier
detect (dcd) line of the serial interface
(see int Modem::getdcd()
). Kom (and modem programing
in general) depends on this line since it is the only way to distinguish
if a connection is established or we're only talking with the modem.
If you ever port Kom to another unix or do you know a posix compatible way to handle dcd-detection, please, please, drop me a line.
Especially need is:
Thanks to:
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.