Modem Problem

[Staar]

Thanks to everyone for their suggestions.  Setting up the internal modem was unsuccessful.  After I set up the external modem I purchased and used pppconfig it worked fine.  I had to add a parameter though: pppconfig <Connection Name> to get it to work.  pon/poff also worked for me for connection/disconnecting when I added the <connection name> after the command.  The speed was ridiculously slow though even for dialup.  It was connecting at only 12mbps.  Can I assume this is because of the provider?  He also found it too difficult to open a terminal window and typing just the few commands.  He's spoiled since I had shortcuts for him on Xandros.  Again, the person using this machine is a total newbie.  He has a hard time finding all the keys on the keyboard!  Is it possible to write/execute a script that issues the commands and place a shortcut to it on the 'desktop'?  

Also, his wife loved the solitaire game that came with Xandros, but of coarse doesn't like the one that comes with Ubuntu and is begging me to get it back.  She hates how slow the cards move.  I know it's a ridiculous request, but is there a place to download more versions of solitaire for Ubuntu?

The os in general seems to be slow as well and takes a while to just navigate around.  Is there a way to speed it up a little?  It's a 10 year old Compaq with a P4 and I believe 256MB ram.  That should be more than enough right?

I talked him into going with dsl so that should improve their experience greatly.  Again, thanks to everyone for their input.  Trying to get support like this for Windows is impossible!


-----Original Message-----
>From: Peter Garrett <peter.garrett at optusnet.com.au>
>Sent: Feb 12, 2007 7:28 PM
>To: ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com
>Cc: "Ubuntu user technical support, not
>	for general discussions" <ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com>, Staar <michael_staar at earthlink.net>
>Subject: Re: Modem Problem
>
>On Mon, 12 Feb 2007 10:13:39 -0600 (GMT-06:00)
>Staar <michael_staar at earthlink.net> wrote:
>
>> If I purchased an external modem, would I have to worry about a different driver every time I change distros?
>
>External serial modems "just work" - they don't rely on software like
>WInmodems, and no modem drivers are required  COM 1 is ttyS0 , COM 2 is
>ttyS1 and so on .
>
>There are several ways to configure the connection. I am no longer on
>dial-up, but I always had the best results using the "pppconfig" utility.
>To configure the connection you type
>
>sudo pppconfig
>
>To connect and disconnect, use the "pon" and "poff" commands respectively.
>
>You can, of course, make a launcher buttton or icon for the commands. An
>easier ( GUI) way is the KDE "kppp" tool. For some reason the Gnome tools
>seem to produce slow connections, unless this has been fixed in Ubuntu
>6.10 .
>
>Peter
>
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