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Last updated Jun. 2 1999 by Morten Rolland

Motivation

The different project team members initially had somewhat different motivation, and probably still have. But the following points probably covers most of them:

  • Educational. There is very little DSP-software freely available for use on standard computers. A working fax-machine designed purly as free software could be a great aid to future signal processing professionals (Project team members included!).
  • Practical. With ISDN installed at home, at least in Norway, you need to buy a separate adapter or an expensive phone with analog phone-line sockets in order to be able to use a standard fax-machine or fax-modem. A much simpler and less expensive setup would be possible if Linux could send and receive faxes over the ISDN-line directly.
  • Challenge 1. Users of MS Windows can send and receive faxes using inexpensive ISDN-cards, and it is about time Linux catches up in this arena!
  • Challenge 2. The fact that a fax-modem needs some timing-critical code to work is a challenge to the Linux operating-system as such. In the Windows world, the fax-modems seems to be implemented as relatively low-level drivers with lots of backing resources. It is a challenge to implement the same functinality in a user-program on Linux, as the kernel is quite large enough already, thank you! (Except for flexible logical volume management and virtualized and safe graphics card drivers which I'd like to see in the kernel...)