Modem users' pain

[Frank Siegert]

Peter Garrett:
| Dmitriy Kropivnitskiy <nigde at mitechki.net> wrote:
| > I haven't tried this myself (don't have a modem or a dial-up account),
| > but when you open System\Administration\Networking, you get a chance to
| > configure "Modem connection" and it looks pretty strainght forward. It
| > asks you for a phone number, username and password and gives you a few
| > reasonable options. I wonder if it works as well as it looks.
|
| No.
| ...
| I still think dialup users need a better interface for configuring their
| connections - and I personally think that a nice gtk2 wizardish front end
| for pppconfig would be a good start. I had a look at zenity yesterday
| thinking I might be able to cobble together a non-functional purely
| cosmetic "this is what I mean" set of boxes, but apparently either zenity
| lacks what I need, or I was unable to find documentation that told me
| enough.
|
| Xdialog may be ugly, but the docs are excellent - if I have time I
| will attempt to at least put some screenshots together, to show what I
| think might be easier and better...
|
| Would this help at all ?

It would only be one step of a few. To be honest, I don't consider the 
post-installation-part, i. e. managing the ISP connection, to be the most 
difficult one:
Kubuntu (kppp): Is already in good shape for what is needed. But does it also 
use /etc/ppp/peers/ setup or only its own?
Ubuntu (System/Administration/Networking): Needs fixes of the reported 
slowness, if reproducable. Needs connection-by-user, instead of sudo? Needs 
tray icon functionality. But this should be done upstream IMHO. Have you 
followed up on any of these yet?

More difficult seems to be the installation part, where these tasks have to be 
solved:
- modem has to be recognized or asked for
- the corresponding, probably even non-free, module needs to be installed 
where possible
- possibly a needed daemon has to be installed
- the admin-user has to be put into the dialout/dip groups
- one ISP can be configured, which should of course also appear in kppp and 
System/Administration/Networking later