Modem users' pain

[Frank Siegert]

12. December 2005 22:50, Magnus Therning:
| wvdial is your friend! Pick one of the groups and use sudo. That's how I
| do it, it's quick and pain free.

If you take into consideration any of the other points, i.e. sl-modem-daemon 
not available on the install-CD and no easy-to-follow documentation on 
setting up the winmodems, this is not that pain free. This statement also is 
contrary to all of my experiences. And you should not have to use sudo for 
starting an internet connection.

| The whole issue around silly modems (i.e. modems that "offload" DSP
| tasks to the CPU) isn't very good. That piece of the market seems to be
| geared entirely to Windows punters. If only "get a real modem!" were a
| solution to the problem ;-)

Well, this is the kind of answer I would expect on a Debian mailing list ;-) 
(no offense!)
But it does not help us a lot in bringing this nice distribution to beginners, 
which, in contrast to Debian (?), is one aim of Ubuntu, is it not? Apart from 
beginners, I am also using a laptop with a built-in winmodem, which I don't 
mind using when somewhere without network connection.