Dial up tools

[Colin Watson]

On Thu, Sep 09, 2004 at 04:53:33PM +0100, Ross Burton wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-09-09 at 16:50 +0100, Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
> > Mary Gardiner wrote:
> > >Selecting Computer menu -> Networking -> Add -> Modem (PPP) immediately
> > >gives an error about wvdial not being installed. It is correct too. I'm
> > >left with pppconfig according to IRC, which is "too hard" because of
> > >aforementioned lack of knowledge of how my modem works or should work.
> > 
> > Is wvdial the right option here? Should we put it in Desktop?
> 
> I'd say the right solution is for gnome-system-tools to grok the Debian
> ppp configuration and not wimp out by using wvdial.  This shouldn't be
> *too* difficult as g-s-t is designed to be pluggable.

In the event that we don't have time to do this, wvdial is installable
from universe (so could in principle be moved) and the networking
configuration tool then seems to do the right thing, although I don't
actually have a modem any more so it's not easy to check.

The package has two obvious problems which we'd need to fix: (1) it
doesn't install noninteractively (Debian bug #219151; would take a while
to fix properly, but it's trivial to fix up so that it respects
DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive), and (2) it depends on the rather old
libdb2 via libwvstreams3-base (Debian bug #248522; there may be library
ABI issues with fixing this the most direct way).

-- 
Colin Watson                                    [cjwatson at canonical.com]