As of kernel 2.6.10, the speedtch module doesn't need modem_run anymore to load the firmware, it uses the generic firmware hotplugging infrastructure. It allows to reuse most of the configuration code for USB modems (orevious speedtouch and eagle-usb packages), and to remove the crappy hacks I added in udev rules to wait for /usr to be mounted (firmwares are in /lib).

But it's not as easy as it was previously, where we simply had to copy the mgmt.o firmware files from Windows drivers. Now, this firmware has to be splitted in two stage files (speedtch-1.bin and speedtch-2.bin). This is done by the firmware-extractor tool, that I package in the speedtouch-firmware-extractor package.

I added support for this new tool and firmware files in drakconnect, so that I can build the new firmware files easily (it can find the original firmware on a Windows partition, and it also allows to manually choose a firmware path now).

This required some new features in our DrakX modules:

• run_program: allow to change the working directory before running programs with the chdir option
• network::thirdparty: allow to reload module in thirdparty options

To make it even easier, I've renamed our previous speedoutch_mgmt commercial package as speedtouch-firmware, and build the two firmware stage files for each modem revision (0, 2 or 4), naming them as speedtch-$stage.bin.$revision (which works fine with the speedtch module).