i have mandravia 2005 it has been working fine, had a bit of trouble installing nvidia drivers but thats all good now.
My problem is i changed my modem it was working fine, i changed to another brand of external modem its a swansmart 56k and now it sort of dials up but doesn't sound right and you don't get connected. I am also running win xp its a dual boot system, and the modem works fine with that it detected it as a rockwell. I think linux is probably still using the previous driver or something, but as i'm a total newbie i just don't know how to sort it out.

use the mandrake control center and reconfigure your modem.........hope that helps.........

i went to the control centre but can't seem to see the place to alter the modem, i can't see it on the list of devices but i did tick automatically detect my modem, but still to no avail

Use the search function and search for swannsmart 56k modems here. There are posts how to get it working