I have an old Compaq with a winmodem. I had previously gotten an external Zoom modem to get Linux to work. Just installed Mandrake 9.1 and it locks up on the winmodem and never fully finds the external modem.

One solution might be to remove the internal modem, but I would rather not unless that is the best fix. I don't think this version of Mandrake (from a Linux magazine) has "kppp", so I could download that I suppose. But I also saw in some post that you could tweak the BIOS to eliminate recognition of the modem - don't know how to do that.

Can anyone tell me what is the easiest solution? Thanks in advance.

There should be a key on your keyboard you can press on boot up to get into your BIOS screen - mine is the tab key for example
Your Compaq might be F10 for example

There should be a section on PCI device configuration I think - try checking that section.

I got to the BIOS and couldn't find anything directly mentioning modems, so I disabled the PCI bus. Then tried to boot Mandrake and use their configuration tool to set the modem again. No good - it still recognizes the winmodem and locks up, never switching to the external Zoom.
Interestingly, Knoppix ignored the winmodem and found the Zoom with no problem.

kppp can be found on the 3rd CD - it is part of the package kdenetwork-kppp-3.1-31mdk.i586.rpm

Thanks, friend, but I got Mandrake on 3 CD's attached to a British Linux magazine. They had to "skinny down" the distro so they left out a lot of KDE/GNOME, including kppp.

Last night I tried to do a reinstall but no good - same problem. Since I know that Knoppix works just fine, I am considering installing that instead, which will give me a Debian system I believe. Anyway, thanks for trying.

Here's a link to a UK ftp site for that file...
ftp://ftp.mirror.ac.uk/sites/sunsite...31mdk.i586.rpm

If you're still having problems, let me know and I'll put it on my site for you.