Modem and Network Connection

[John M. Moniz]

I recently installed Ubuntu 6.06 from a live CD to my mother-in-law's PC 
and there were a few things I am not yet happy with. But I'll just stick 
to the modem and networking issues.

At boot-up:
1) When the PC boots up, the modem dials the ISP all on its own. That's 
actually pretty annoying as the first task always has to be to break the 
connection unless she's immediately going to the internet. I could not 
find a configuration to disable the dialing at boot and I don't like my 
solution, which was to rename /etc/ppp/dial_on_boot (I'm going by memory 
on the file name, so may be slightly off). There's probably a 
configuration somewhere for this and it would be nice to know what it is.

Dialing up the modem on demand is not very convenient the way I left it 
for her:
2) I have put the network connection icon on her desktop and on the top 
panel so she can connect or disconnect from the network. Somehow, I 
don't think this network connection utility is the best thing to use 
because it is really a network configuration utility. As such, takes a 
while to open up (since it searches for existing configurations every 
time) and it also requires a password each time. Even getting rid of the 
password requirement would be a help, but a quick dialing script would 
be best.

3) For dialing the modem, I actually found some applet (red telephone 
icon) that I added to the top panel and it seems that it's what I'm 
looking for. But it simply doesn't work. It doesn't dial and it doesn't 
disconnect. It is also suppose to give the connection status, but 
sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. And I can't bring up the 
properties to see if there is something that I could reconfigure to make 
it work. I also can't tell what the name of that utility is to reinstall.

Any ideas on any of the above would be appreciated.

Thanks,

John.