Modem users' pain

[Peter Garrett]

On Mon, 12 Dec 2005 21:50:18 +0000
Magnus Therning <magnus at therning.org> wrote:

> On Mon, Dec 12, 2005 at 09:45:53PM +0100, Frank Siegert wrote:
> >This is a call for easing the (K)ubuntu life of modem users.
> >
> >Many beginners are not on a LAN or WLAN, thus they have to set up some kind of 
> >dialup connection, which is not achievable by a beginner yet (please correct 
> >me, if I just did not find the right tool/way)
 [snipped]

>wvdial is your friend! Pick one of the groups and use sudo. That's how I
>do it, it's quick and pain free.

< sounds of hollow laughter>

Sorry, but as one who has spent hours (literally) trying to talk beginners
throught setting up ordinary functional serial *real* modems on #ubuntu
IRC, this really makes me chuckle.

wvdial is *not* painless or easy for the sort of user Ubuntu is supposedly
targetting. neither is pppconfig, although I've had more success talking
people through using that. And neither is discoverable - the only reason I
know about them is a few years spent using Debian.

Something similar to KDE's kppp is desperately needed in a default Ubuntu
install - in fact something even simpler would be better. The existing
graphical tool in the network setup has deep problems in my view.  My
experience, and that of others, has been that when it "works", and
connects, it produces *very* slow connections (I am not a developer so I
have no idea why). 

People also do not expect to have to use a password to dial up. This has
been fixed for years in kppp, and even pppconfig works fine, with the
user in the dialup and dip groups.

Surely someone with more expertise than I possess could write a simple
wizard to set up dialup? (I discovered that pppconfig is capable of
using xdialog, zenity and friends - but the GUIs are horrible)

As things stand, the first thing I do when installing Ubuntu is set up
with pppconfig, and make a couple of buttons for pon/poff. The panel
applet is annoying, asks for a password, and as pointed out above, seems to
produce slow connections anyway.

You might consider this a rant and waste of bandwidth, and ask why I
haven't submitted a bug report. Well, I assume the dialup config is part
of the network config interface. I don't think it needs to be - and I
feel a *prominent* and *simple* solution should be presented to new
users - i.e. human beings. A decent GUI front end to pppconfig would be an
idea. If I knew how to program I would do one myself, but as I don't,
I'm appealing to the experts on this list.


Sincerely,

Peter
-- 

Linux User #343161