I've installed Mandriva '08 from a DVD (Ebay) on my HP DV9000 Laptop. I've done this in an attempt to find a distribution that will easily support a dialup modem connected to a USB / Serial converter, and my built in WiFi card. The converter is a Dynex UBDB9.
During install Mandriva failed to locate the modem attached to the converter, and I'm finding that when I try to install KPPP or any other software in an attempt to find and activate the modem, the software managment system will not acknowledge the presence of the install DVD in the drive, though I can easily access the DVD....... I'm kind of stalled at this point as I cannot get past this........ Any suggestions?

SUSE 10.2 has been my OS of choice...... but I cannot seem to get it to find and install drivers for the wireless, or acknowledge the presence of the USB converter either. This is a major frustration for me.... I use dialup...... and rarely wireless, and this laptop lacks a serial port...... or a conventional PCMCIA slot..... having instead a miniturized version. I use a call waiting modem, so a PCMCIA modem would not be satisfactory anyway. I'm in a very rural area where broadband is NOT an option, nor is wireless unless I'm traveling. The miserable little Winmodem works fine under Vista, but I refuse to use Windows on line for obvious reasons.

Howard

I have built in Winmodem, USB serial, and wireless all working under Suse 10.1 on my laptop. Unfortunately it has been long enough that I will not be able to remember all the steps.
If your laptop modem has a Conexant chipset you can check out Linuxant. Free to try to make sure it works but 20 bucks for the full license. As soon as I installed this in Linux my Conexant Winmodem worked great.
For the USB serial device I see (with "lsmod") that a usbserial module is started when I plug in my adaptor. If you see that too it is just a matter of knowing the correct device name. Mine is /dev/ttyUSB0. Although I have external modems my use for the adaptor is serial port connections rather than modem.
For modem connections I like to use "wvdial". It is pretty easy to use. Just check out "man wvdial" and "man wvdial.conf". In a root terminal I type "wvdial" to start the modem connection and CTRL-c to stop it.
For wireless it involved installing ndiswrapper and choosing the correct INF driver from the unzipped Windows driver file on my Linux partition.

Thanks for the info......... for some reason I cannot get a windows driver to work for my wifi using Ndiswrapper in SUSE........ I've tried everything that appears to be appropriate for the unit. I will try the Conexant thing...... I will be better to have at least the winmodem operational than nothing at all.
I'm not familiar with ismod...... I just now typed that command in in the terminal (SU mode) on this machine (running suse 10) and got a command not found.

you've given me some good leads to pursue....... I think I'll put the laptop back to SUSE 10.2 ....... and my other desktop which I haven't put on line yet (newly constructed).

thanks.......... Howard