I am a member of a LUG in north Idaho, I have been trying to help a new member with her Dell Inspiron 1100. We went to Mandrake 9.2 to solve the monitor problem, and have everything up and going except the PCMCIA modem We have tried three and get the same result. the modem dials just like it does on my IBM when you watch the send and receive chart you see a spike of about 50-60 bytes then it flat lines and nothing gets transferred. I went to the command line SU and user tried KPPP and monitored the results and got these errors:
Mutex destroy failure
Chkmod: failed to get attributes of "PPPD"
no sch file dir.
couldn't find interface ppp0

I have tried three different pcmcia modems on the computer with the same result, and tried the same three modems on my IBM the modems all work equally well so it has to be in the Dell but I have run out of ideas, any suggestions?