I recently purchased RedHat Linux 7 for the purpose of upgrading my RH 6.1 box. I installed the new operating system on a new partition of a new hard disk. I am accustomed to using vgetty as an answering machine and using kppp to dial up. I have been unable to use either rp3 or kppp while vgetty is running, although this never was a problem with RH 6.1 (or 5.2 before that). I _can_ use minicom even when vgetty is running to dial numbers, but when I run rp3-config debug, the console reads: WvDial: Internet dialer version 1.41 Initializing modem. Sending: ATZ Modem not responding. ERROR: Unable to initialize modem (kppp has a similar although slightly different error) I worked around this by writing a script to edit vgetty out of inittab, then run init q, then run kppp, then re-edit inittab to put vgetty back in after kppp exits, and run init q again. It seems to work...although there ought to be a better way...and it must be run as root...
Sorry for the long delay in processing this bug report - it slipped through the cracks somehow. This issue should definitely be fixed in all current Red Hat mgetty releases - mgetty now only locks the modem device when it is actually handling a dial-in call .