I have to reboot my new Asus laptop, sometimes many times, under Debian 6 before I successfully get my "Ipstar" satellite Internet connection established. Sometimes it simply does not work at all for a whole day, however, if I try under Windows 7 on the same machine, my rate of success is much greater. I had the same problem on an old Toshiba laptop which I replaced exactly for that reason.

I suspect my configuration is faulty under Debian 6.

The OS of the old Toshiba as well as the OS of the Asus seemed to detect the hardware successfully.

Can someone suggest a solution or a link to one?

Thank you for your help.

Don't know how it works really but here are some tips.

Does the device provide a serial port you could access? When I have problems with my GSM usb dongle I sometimes go into the serial port for it and try to connect (AT commands I think... haven't done it in a while so can't be really sure) and see the output from the operation. For as USB dongle even wvdial can be more verbose than GUI applications.