The suggestion to use the KDE GUI and the KPPP dialer was a good one, seems like a much nicer and more comprehensive interface. However, it reports that my modem is busy, when I know its not. I even turned the modem off and on to reset it, no change. So I'm still dead in the water.

erm.. guess this is actually meant to carry on from another thread??? doesn't really make much sense...

but i'd guess you've an external modem then, which won't work nicely in kde.

ok, I always suggest using wvdial first to establish a connection withit. wvdialconf will search everywhere relevant for a modem, and should find it. You may well have rights issues with the device, that crops up a lot.

ok, it's also worth checking /var/log/messages while doing that sort of thing to see if there are any messages from ppp, but i'd guess you're not really up to that stage with the modem anyway

Well, I finally got it. Lots of good suggestions, but in the end I bought a new modem, external because I didn't want to add any more problems than necessary when I was running in my original windows partition, and it all came together. Now, I'm answering from a KDE GUI environment. The modem, which wasn't easy to find (Frye's Electronics), is a Best Data for $79.95, and it was the only one I found, even looking at Super Robotics modems up to $129.95, that said right on the box that it worked in Linux.

Lots of fun. When I tried to reboot before installing the new modem, my system had a file error which wasn't fixable. I had to reinstall my OS and that was far from simple. Several attempts failed, going into a loop just when they were about to begin installing packages.

I'm highly appreciative of all the suggestions I received and was gratified to know that I was in a friendly and helpful environment. I'm just laying the groundwork for a major project you you'll probably be seeing more of me but I'm looking forward to getting a little free time to try to help others. Of course if anyone has a problem related to the problems I went through I will make time to do what I can. Thank you all.

Norman Tilbury