My mother has been a happy Ubuntu user ever since I installed Dapper to solve the countless problems she was having with Windows Me. Since her computer is starting to age, and she's a 5-hour drive away, I bought her a brand new computer for her birthday, which I've been installing with Lucid this week.Problem is, she is still stuck on Dial-Up internet access no matter how hard she's tried to get broadband from the local phone and cable companies.
Unfortunately, NetworkManager still doesn't have 56K modem support, so a few steps are necessary to setup Ubuntu for dial-up.
Since her phone line is noisy, I purchased a reliable modem that doesn't need special drivers to work in Linux, along with an appropriate USB-to-serial adaptor.
Once I made sure the modem was visible by searching through dmesg for the right serial port, and testing it with minicom, I performed the following steps:
- Installed the gnome-ppp package
- Added her user to the "dip" group so gnome-ppp could spawn the pppd daemon
- Configured gnome-ppp with the phone number, username and password provided by her ISP
Once that was done, connecting to the Internet worked great, except for a single problem: Firefox would always start up in "Work Offline" mode. It turns out Firefox uses NetworkManager to figure out if an Internet connection is available when it starts. To fix this:
- Type "about:config" in the Firefox URL bar
- Search for the "toolkit.networkmanager.disable" key
- Switch it to "true"
I'm looking forward to seeing her go from Hardy to Lucid this weekend!
