Kom

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Screen shots (somewhat outdated)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.

Contents

Introduction

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.

Installation

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.

make install

Configuration

With 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.

Phonebook

Kom's phonebook is by default installed on you desktop as folder Kom. To create a new modem configuration use kfm's 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)

Platform dependencies

Probably runs only on Linux. Other Unixes which are POSIX compatible are good canditates for a portation try. There is only one two-line routine which is non-posix and linux-dependent, but you certainly have to supply a platform dependent solution to make Kom work.

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.

Bug reports

Please send bug reports, extention proposals, etc. to lars.doelle@on-line.de.

Informations needed

Coding a program like Kom typically raises a bulk of questions. Some of them can easily answered, some take a while. This section deals with problems that have not been solved, since some informations are missing. If you know the answer, you could do me and everyone who uses Kom a favor.

Especially need is:

Miscelaneous

Known bugs and open tasks

Credits

Allthough Kom is a complete newly developed program, it owes much to other programs and their designers, who provided solutions and helpfull information with their code. Without them, coding Kom would have been much harder.

Thanks to:

Copyright (C) 1997 by Lars Doelle

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

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.