Over a year ago, I was surprised to hear a friend say fax on Linux was so poor that he couldn't use Linux in his small office. The reason for my surprise was that there are not many people who want to use Linux more than my friend does. He found various fax programs for Linux, but none of them worked to his satisfaction in his office environment. He was very unhappy about that state of affairs. My friend is a cofounder of the Austin LUG, so it was definitely not just a case of newbie-itis.
A couple of months ago, another friend tipped me off about an upcoming beta of a Linux port of PMfax -- a name familiar to me from my OS/2 days. I didn't have a modem on my home office LAN, so I didn't try it myself, but I told the friend who had mentioned his bad luck with Linux fax applications. When he described the beta in glowing terms, I knew the state of Linux faxing was about to change for the better.
How we tested
Hardware
Processor: AMD 450mhz K6-2
Memory: 128 MB SDRAM
Mass storage: 18-GB IBM IDE drive
Modem: Zoom 56Kbx DualMode FaxModem
Platform
Operating System: Red Hat Linux 6.2
Kernel: Unmodified 2.2.14-5.0
For some time now, I have only used modems on road trips, so purchasing one was my first order of business before trying Pmfax, which is manufactured by Keller Group. I settled on an external modem to avoid problems with lobotomized internals; you know, those WinModem things. I've had very good luck with my 56-KB Zoom PCMCIA card on the laptop, so I picked another Zoom -- the FaxModem 56Kx Dualmode (V.90 and K56flex protocol) -- for the external. By the time I purchased and installed the hardware, the beta had almost expired. I downloaded the software on the final day and requested a serial number that would allow me to run it in its full-featured mode (the Pro version) through the last day of the month.
I followed the instructions in the ample documentation included in the download, and created a subdirectory to hold all the programs and documentation. Then I went into that directory and typed ./pmfpro-l.bin. A license agreement immediately appeared, and after I accepted the terms, the file unzipped itself. Then I started PMfax (see the screen shot below) by entering ./pmfax, then entering the serial number provided.
Figure 1. The PMfax welcome page
Next, I had to add a new printer to /etc/printcap, and a new spool directory for that printer to /var/spool/lpd. If that sounds difficult, don't be afraid. I copied a few lines of text from the documentation into the printcap file, created the required directory by typing mkdir/var/spool/lpd/fx, then changed the owner and group of the newly created fx directory to match that of other spooled devices. In Red Hat 6.2, that means changing the owner to root and the group to lp. For Storm 2000, that means changing both the owner and the group to lp. You need to find out how your distribution sets the permissions on existing spool directories, and follow suit for the fx directory.
The good news is that once you've done that, you can make fx the printer for any applications that allow you to choose the printer. For those that don't, you can simply enter fxfilter as the print command. Wait -- I forgot one thing. You have to move or copy the fxfilter executable from the subdirectory you created for PMfax to a directory in your path. Type env at a command line prompt to display your current environment, including the path. You can also add that directory to your path. I just copied it to /usr/bin/local.
When I had finished housekeeping, I clicked on File and chose Print in Netscape, printed to a printer instead of a file, and gave fxfilter as the print command. Clicking OK started PMfax and quickly spawned a child window to get the necessary information to send the fax.
I enabled the default cover sheet, filled in my demographics, manually entered the recipient's name and phone number, and clicked on Send Current. I watched the modem's lights; I heard it dial, heard the fax machine harmonizing, then heard the silence that followed their agreement. A couple of minutes later, my first fax, a seven-page printout of a single Webpage, was complete.
I do not have a separate fax line in my home office; when I asked a friend to send me a fax, I had to be ready when the call came in. With PMfax, this means starting the program and clicking on Fax, then Receive, then One Call. You can set Receive Fax to Off, Receive Current Call, One Call, or All Calls. When I got the fax call, it just worked. I could view the fax, flip the image so I didn't have to read it upside down, and print it. In about 15 minutes, I had installed the beta, sent a fax, and received a fax; PMfax ranks high in ease of use.
So how much does a professional-quality, easy-to-install, easy-to-use fax program for Linux cost? You can download PMfax Lite for Linux from the company's Website (see Resources for a link) for free. If you simply must have all the extra bells and whistles in PMfax Pro -- and there are quite a few -- the price is $99. That gets you a long list of extras, including Internet faxing, multiple phone books, support for fax broadcasting, and fax editing. If all you need to do is send and receive an occasional fax, PMfax Lite will do the trick. Lite and Pro both support the printing of faxes from within applications.
One surprising feature I discovered while beating on PMfax was its ability (in both versions) to act as an answering machine as well as a fax machine, if you have a compatible voice-capable modem and a sound card. External Zoom modems use either a Rockwell or a Lucent chipset (mine has Lucent); PMfax supports both. It took just a little bit of tweaking to correctly set the Voice options, record a message, and save it as ogm.wav in the PMfax directory -- once I did that, my answering machine was in service.
I asked Mark Ahlstrom, president of Keller Group, how well the beta had been received. He said, "We had over 700 testers who officially registered, and probably many more who just used the product in the free Lite mode without registering to get the Pro serial number for testing. The feedback was very good. With so many different Linux distributions, configurations, PC hardware and modem hardware out there, you will always run into a few puzzling cases, but we seem to be running very well on all Linux distributions (using a single binary)."
In what was probably the most definitive statement of the beta's popularity, the production versions of PMfax Lite and PMfax Pro were released one day after the beta test period ended on Oct. 23.
The Keller Group offers one other product in its suite of fax programs, a LAN server version. It is only available for OS/2, although it can serve clients on Windows, OS/2, or Linux machines. I asked Ahlstrom if the LAN server version would ever be ported to Linux; he said it depended primarily on how well the Lite and Pro versions are received.
Print
Close Window