preferred method of setting up dialup

[azz]

This question brings to light one of the most fascinating limitations of
developing software by a team of people from around the world.

The cannonical team are a highly-skilled and motivated bunch of experts
who will stop at nothing to create and maintaint he worlds most advanced
operating system.  They have many a ressource and lots of experience. 
Their achilles heel however, is that among all thrity-nine members,
they only own one modem.

I remember the early discussions about who will be getting the modem
for such-and-such a week and who will pay for shipping.  There was even
a bounty put up for the person who could discover how to send a peice of
hardware though email.  A noble project - one which would have sped up
the development of the modem networking interface by a ratio of
5.6k:310k.  The absence of an integrated firewall was also implemented
to facilitate the transportation of hardware in this fasion.  Needless
to say, it did not work.  An eager Canonical member stood empty handed
in Nebraska while the modem sat silently on a shelf in Kiev.

I had even thought to jump in myself (I'm just this guy, you know.  Not
a computer scientist or anything).  How could I help?  What do I do
best?  Ebay!  I scoured the pages and pages of ebay modem sales.  I
remember the shreik of joy I let out when I had discovered the perfect
modem.  There is was, "pulled from a functioning unit" and within my
price range!

You could not have imagined my chagrin when some bastard from Nebraska
outbid me in the last twenty seconds....

"But don't many laptops and desktops come with modems built-in onboard"
Software modems, you say?  Winmodems are not modems.  That is what the
website says!  To comapre these little morcels of technology to a modem
is akin to calling an hors-d'oeuvre the plat principale.  Like comparing
a minnow in a glass of pond water to a generous helping of salmon
tartare.

Yes, I had considered this possibility.  In fact, I got in contact with
the maintainer of a project called scanModem and asked him if he would
contribute it under the GPL to the debian project.  He responded that
we should talk over something called SKYPE.

It seems that this is a way of talking over the internet using a
speaker and a microphone.  Well, not wanting to let the poor guy down I
quickly raced up the stairs and stole my daughter's "Speak'n'Sing"
microphone from her hands.  I plugged the bright red connector into my
computer's microphone jack and tested it.  It works!  I downloaded the
application (it seems to be an application based on QT)

I unfortunately tried to run the application while attempting to get a
software modem to run.  The resulting suction of CPU power and memory
resulted in a computer that it whirling away at 100 per cent cpu power.
I expect the SKYPE dialog box interface to appear on my screen any day
now.  I will update you with the news then.



Also, I have found by discussing with people on the forums, more
success with using pppconfig and the modem-lights applet on the panel
as opposed to using wvdial.  It is not intuitive, since you must modify
the settings so that the applet looks for the correct device.  In
pppconfig, you may add your user to the dip group in the advanced
settings.  It would be nice if there was some sort of integration with
modem-lights and the networking tool.


-- 
azz