External dial up modem problems with 10.1CE
 

I just got Mandrake 10.1 community and for some reason I can not get my external (serial) dial up modem to work. It is recognized and I can configure it under "Configure Your Computer". But, when I try to connect the modem connection it says connecting and the timer starts, but the modem's lights don't indicate activity and my phone line isn't being used whatsoever. I'm using KDE.

Also, does anyone know how Mandrake goes about releasing their iso's? I know 10.1ce is free and 10.1 official is out to paying subscribers, but will they eventually put official out for free? Thanks.

EDIT: By the way, I had Mandrake 9.1 a while back and could effortlessly dial up with the same modem. Perhaps I'm missing something obvious. Mandrake's GUI utilities are sometimes more confusing that command line, but I can't remember how to go about this with the command line. This is making me feel like more of a newbie than I generally consider myself. Perhaps I need a less user-friendly distro again.

Update:

I messed some more with the modem and since the connection made with the drakconf wizard is ppp0, I did ifup ppp0 from the console and actually got the modem to audibly dial. It sounded like it was done, but I still couldn't ping domains or get to any webpages. I want to find a better distro (Mandrake's decent but 10.1 ce is buggy), but I tried Fedora 1 and 2 and don't like them, SUSE downloads won't go over 20 kBps, and I'm not knowledgeable enough to do installs of Gentoo or Slackware. Any suggestions?

yes 10.1 ce is buggy, but i dont believe that the Mandrake forum is a place for people to start bashing mandrake and reccomending other distros. you may want to do some reading up in the distributions forum, i believe there must be about a 1000 posts on "which distro is for me or the best" or you can also go to www.distrowatch.com and do some research.

Agreed, I'll do some research.