I've got an odd issue with dial up and logging in. Kppp isn't giving me much love and from my ts I believe it's due to pppd starting before I can log in. So I tried doing so manually through kppp's mini term. Everything connects fine and I get prompted for my username. Here's where the fun starts. I can only type certain characters! For instance if I type my username blahblah@myisp.com I get something that resembles eeeertec. But to throw a monkey to the wrench the characters that won't come up normally will come up in caps? So I attempt to be clever and copy/paste my un in and it shows up fine but I can't hit enter to procede! To make this slightly more clear if I wanted to type "b" it wouldn't come up but "shift+b" gives me "B". I don't see any sort of pattern and I tried different charsets but no joy. What makes this really interesting is that it does the same thing in wvdial and minicom. However in minicom I can't copy/paste my un but I can do "ctr+enter" which gives me "enter" and a password prompt. It appears that it doesn't like the input in some fashion but I have no idea why and I'm out of ideas! As far as the specifics I'm on a fresh install of rh9 and everything else works kewl. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Keyboard is usb if that means anything. Please advise!

pppd has to start before you can log in, because that's what tells the kernel that you want to use the modem in the first place. The rest of your problem sounds really bizarre, something I've never had the "pleasure" of dealing with, so I can't help you there. Have you tried wvdial? That might help, it did wonders for me when I was on dialup.

Here's a little clarification. I end up getting pppd quit err 10 when just trying to connect with kppp- the serial line is not 8bit clean. From my reading on that ppp is starting before I have authenticated so its bouncing the packets back. Sorry i think I said pppd in my first post! Anyways I'm just trying to log in manually and see what happens but I just can't type my username so I'm stuck there. I've tried with kppp's mini-term, wvdial, and minicom and I get stopped at that point in each. They each act a little different but in essence the same thing happens. At login I type my username and only certain characters actually show up. After the usual try a whole buch of keys I discovered that some chars will come up fine and others only if I use shift+(key) but they are in caps! Any better? Please advise. Thanks