Modem and Network Connection

[Derek Broughton]

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.

It's a long time since I used dial-up, but I'm sure a gui would have just
done what you did :-)
> 
> Dialing up the modem on demand is not very convenient the way I left it
> for her:

Google for "ppp demand dial".  You can make it dial automatically whenever
she wants to connect to the net. 

> 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. 

A shortcut to "pon" would do the job for manual connections.  

> 3) For dialing the modem, I actually found some applet (red telephone
> icon) 

I used to use kppp - don't know what the default is for Gnome.
-- 
derek