Thanks John, I went to table and found that my modem was in fact listed with an OK in left hand column. So I believe it should work with Linux. I did ask Dell to make sure that they sent me a hardware modem not a Winmodem but I was beginning to wonder when I couldn't get it set up.
So now that I have this info should I start experimenting with IRQs with setserial? I'm also curious as to whether I can believe what dmsg tells me. If it finds modem at ttyS00 does that mean it's really there or could this be a default setting from some configuration file? Thanks for any pointers you can give and thanks for your incredibly speedy response. Ken
