Modem and Network Connection

[Anthony M Simonelli]

On Mon, 2007-03-19 at 18:48 -0500, John M. Moniz 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.
> 
> 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.
> 

Though it is part of the universe repository, I use GnomePPP to dial
into my company's network.  It is basically a frontend to WVdial, a
command-line dialer.  It has an option to dock the program into the tray
after it's connected.  Double-clicking the tray icon provides connection
stats.

I suggest removing any PPP connections from your Network settings,
install GnomePPP (sudo aptitude install gnomeppp), and give that a try.