I'm going to be converting a friend's Dell Dimension from XP to Slackware 13.0 plus VirtualBox to keep XP in for occasional use. My friends live on a farm and the only access they have to the outside world is dial-up, shiver me timbers but that's the way it is and will be for a while (perhaps for eternity plus one week).

I'm just wondering if there's a best-practice way of setting up Slackware for dial-out with a USB modem for internet access? It's been a long, long time since I've messed with dial-up for anything but occasional use; it's going to be a Zoom USB modem (that I do know how to get going with kppp (I use one with my laptop when in the boonies) but just askin'.

It has been a while since I was on dial-up only, but I always preferred kppp. I used to leave it open when I shutdown my machine so that when I restarted it only took a couple of mouse clicks to get on-line. As your friend is converting from XP, then KDE is likely to be the preferred DE, at least initially.
Recently I took my laptop "to the boonies" and found that kppp will also work from within Windowmaker, provided that the setup has been completed within KDE.

I also had a ppp setup that would work for dial-up, but found that using both used to cause problems with DNS resolution on occasions if something went wrong. kppp creates it's own entries in /etc/resolv.conf and removes them when the connection is closed correctly. This could get out of sync, and required some manual editing to straighten out. Not something that a newbie should have to deal with.

KPPP works very well and is easy to setup.
I've had trouble getting Chestnut Dialer to work properly and never have been able to get wvdialer to work.

Yeah, that's just about what I figured -- kppp works just fine with a Zoom USB modem and all that. I think what I'm wondering about is the network setup stuff; I think I just don't do it (except adding a couple of known-good local DNS servers addresses manually to /etc/resolv.conf, maybe). Or maybe setting the network stuff for DHCP; I mean, there won't be any need for eth0 to be running (ain't no network, ain't no need for eth0, eh?). Like just don't start the networking "rc.inet" stuff.

This is one of those the-fewer-the-problems-the-better things (gonna be bad enough getting XP installed and "updated" -- we'll lug the thing to the library where there's a hi-speed connection for that nonsense).

They're going to be using KDE -- thing has 4G of RAM in it and KDE is user-friendly enough in spite (or because) of the bloat in the thing. Nobody needs to learn all about window managers and all that goes with that -- these ain't geeks, they're ordinary folk that need something stable and reliable and I think that's full-boat Slackware with KDE and away you go. She's used Solaris for a long time (and is familiar with standard utilities and the like), he's not, doesn't matter.

Anyway, thank for the input.

No need to even setup the network as he doesn't have one.
Why confuse the guy when all he needs is KPPP?

When running netconfig, choose the 'loopback' option.

Ah-ha! Knew there would be some butt-byter in there; thanks!

KPPP worked well for me, too. But I remember that I once was in a situation when it just wouldn't do. I don't recall, what the actual problem was, but the solution was to use wvdial. I guess, there's a SlackBuild script for it.

If KPPP works for your friends, stick with it. If not, try wvdial.

gargamel

Also, decide from the start whether you will use kpp or not. If you start trying with kpp and then try with pppsetup, you will wind up where neither works and you must uninstall and reinstall the package to fix it. You probably will not want to use pppsetup as it requires you to know the DNS addresses before-hand and there is no GUI frontend, though it is easy to create one for the ppp-on and ppp-off commands.
If for some odd reason you do decide to go the old-fashioned pppsetup way, then use my ispsetup script instead of pppsetup as it allows you to use dynamic DNS -you only need to give it the phone number, username and password:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/...ects/ispsetup/
(Same caveats as with pppsetup, though -don't mix with kppp)

Hey, Gilbert,

Nah, there is no way on this earth that I'm going to fiddle with the old-fashioned way; KPPP works just fine and it's going to be The One (if for no other reason than I don't want the phone ringing at, you know, 0300 or so). Thanks for the script, though, looks like a nice option (just in case!).