Connecting to Internet - again

[Bill Cairns]

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My sincere thanks for the trouble that so many, especially David, have taken 
to help me get connected. I now have two items on my desktop ("Connect" 
and "Disconnect" which use "pon" and "poff") which connect me to my service
provider (and disconnect me again) easily and without any need for passwords.

David, I am sorry but I must be awful slow at this Ubuntu security. I can
create a new user but, unless I give that user administrative privileges,  I 
cannot use the System > Administration > Network applet to connect to the 
network. I simply get the diagnostic that administration privileges are required 
(or words to that effect). Of course, if I do give the user administration privileges, 
it does work but then that user has full rights to do anything they want. This is the 
"security hole" that I was afraid of. However, this is fairly academic as the pon and
 poff method works perfectly.

So the good news is that pppconfig now works perfectly and sets the default
user with no problems. I am not sure why it did not work before, and am not
really going to go back and try and redo every setting that I did
before to see what I did wrong. Two possibilities though - previously I was configuring the
modem to use "chat" rather than "peer" authentication (OK I know it
should have nothing to do with it); or it is possible that the two
methods of connecting (pppconfig + pon v the applet) interfere with each
other and cause strange inconsistencies.

Also my thanks to Steve for the information on how to configure Firefox.
My speed of browsing is now as good as one can expect from a slowish
modem and line. There are certainly a lot of "undocumented" (I am sure
they are documented somewhere!) configuration features in Firefox.

My only disappointment if that Gnome-ppp simply does not recognise my
modem. I have no idea why.

Bill