I am trying to setup up RH 9.0 for SBC DSL. The Modem is a 2Wire HomePortal 1000SW connected via a hub. The computer is dual boot with Windows, which connects without problem.

The DSL modem acts as a DHCP server, and ifconfig shows eth0 is picking up an address, so it is seeing the modem over the network.

Under Gnome System Tools I used the Internet Configuration Wizard. Under the "xDSL connetion" option answered as follows:

Ethernet device: eth0 (default)
Provider name: SBCglobal
Login Name: notmyname@sbcglobal.net
Password: ************ (password for above account)

This created a ppp0 device of type xDSL in the network configuration. When I try to activate this device, I recieve these error messages:

Cannot activate network device ppp0!
/sbin/adsl-start: line 217: 12674 Terminated $CONNECT "$@" >/dev/null 2>&1

Any ideas? Called SBC but they seemed cluelss regarding Linux. I've worked with computers for quite a while but am new to Linux.

Umm, why do you need to do all that? If you setup the login on your gateway (gateway.2wire.net) under broadband connection/advanced settings it'll autoconnect whenever anything connects to it on your network. If you set the ppp timeout to 0 you should be all set to never lose your net connection.

So all you need to do is setup your linux box with dhcp and the gateway takes care of everything else.