Went through the whole rigamerole (sp? LOL) and my pppd daemon still "dies unexpectedly" ...I did get it to the point where it actual dials now. Mind you this is only a problem in Gnome. KDE has no problems. Went through and setserial properly and permissions to my etc/ppp files i.e. pap-secrets. All (2, pri, sec)nameservers are correct. Any idears as to why Gnome doesn't like me dialing out? The only thing I have to go on are these errors in my /var/log/messages file:

modprobe:modprobe: can't locate module tty-ldisc-3
pppd[1631]: Couldn't set tty to PPP discipline: Invalid Argument

I may be dumb and missing something, but right now my brain is toast.

Your PPP options in any 2.4 kernel should be as follows:
[*] PPP (point-to-point protocol) support
[ ] PPP multilink support (EXPERIMENTAL) [*] PPP support for async serial ports
[ ] PPP support for sync tty ports [*] PPP Deflate compression [*] PPP BSD-Compress compression
[ ] PPP over Ethernet (EXPERIMENTAL)

The problem is related to the support for 'async serial ports' option not being selected.

Well i do have it set that way except for BSD compression. Only problems i'm having now really are permissions to the options file. Thanks though..