problem fixed (was Re: M$ alteration of MY hardware)

[Jonathan Hutchins]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Eric Gilliland" <jegilliland at hotmail.com>

> ...  Part of the
> problem was then when I did a setup from the kppp dialog box, /dev/ttyS4
was
> not one of the options under the device tab.
...
> Saturday morning, I found a box that opened the connection wizard.  There
I
> was able to set the modem as /dev/ttyS4 and lo and behold it worked after
> that.

So the problem was really just that kppp wasn't working, right?  And it
turns out to be a poor interface design on the program, not a hardware
problem after all.

It's often a good troubleshooting technique to start with the simplest
command line utility that will work with your problem - in this case,
setserial will usually generate a response from from the port.  minicom can
usually talk to any serial device.  Establish that the port's working, that
the modem's responding, that it's dialing and handshaking, then work your
way up.

Most of my modem use in Linux was as a dial-up gateway using diald, which
you might find more useful than kppp unless you have a lot of user-level
things you want to change about the connection.

I know it's easier to point-and-click than it is to write a configuration
file, but using the config file will give you better understanding and often
better control.  If you change desktops or if KDE gets updated, you don't
have to worry about your hardware not working.  And Webmin?  gahhh!  I don't
even like linuxconf, because you can end up with linuxconf setting one
configuration and the conventional config file setting something completely
different.  Follow a HOWTO that uses a different configuration utility and
you can end up hosed!