Modem and Network Connection

[Peter Garrett]

On Mon, 19 Mar 2007 18:48:22 -0500
"John M. Moniz" <john.moniz at sympatico.ca> wrote:

> 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.

Dial-up seems not to be a priority for the Gnome devs, for some reason. In
Ubuntu this has always struck me as odd, since a high proportion of
"humans" still have to use it.

Two possible solutions, neither optimal.

1) install kpp, the KDE dial-up tool. It works. Downside: you have to get
various qt/KDE libraries with it... may or may not put you off if you have
bad connectivity in the first place.

2) Use the "pppconfig" command line tool to configure dial-up - this is
what I always used before May last year when I finally got DSL.

sudo pppconfig

... answer the questions, leave out the name of the provider, unless you
have more than one.

... add your user to the dialout and dip groups to avoid having to give a
password each time you dial. ( This appears to be OK by default, but check
anyway)

... the command to dial up is "pon" - "poff" to disconnect. Make a couple
of launchers for these commands ( I sometimes used a green and a red apple
as icons ;-) )

pppconfig seems to give the best results - some people like wvdial but
personally I didn't. YMMV and all that .

Peter