[ILUG] Problem with internet on Mandrake 10 Community ed

[Anthony]

A.Mac Hugh wrote:

> Hi I hope some here can help me. Last night I finally dual booted my 
> Laptop (Packard Bell M5) with mandrake 10 community edition (May issue 
> of Linux Format. There just one problem, can't get the internet to work. 
> It look like mandrake doesn't  recognizes the modem, so I got hold of a 
> PCMIA card modem which I new worked with Linux, I still had no luck .So 
> I booted in to windows to see which ports they attached to ,COM3&4  
> ,went back in to Linux and tried them, it still did work.
> 
> While in Linux some messages came up, can't find /etc/resovl.conf ask 
> you system addmiastration to create it, so I log in to root and created 
> it.  Then said can not find /dev/modem so I created it too. Also there 
> was some message saying couldn't find modem in /mtab and /fstab I think 
> these were in the /ect.. I tried all I know, which is a lot as still new 
> to Linux.

Hi A,

I'd say it's likely that you have some form of WinModem installed on 
your machine. The Mandrake GUI probably isn't going to be of much to you 
in solving the problem. I'd recommend going to an X terminal and typing 
'lspci' to find out what kind of PCI modem is installed in your laptop. 
With Mandrake you also get the 'lspcidrake' command which gives the same 
information in a slightly more readable format.

However WinModems are a real pain to set up and it could be difficult to 
get a binary driver for your WinModem with Mandrake 10 which AFAIR uses 
the latest stable Linux kernel (version 2.6). If your PCMCIA modem is a 
Xircom, you should have much more luck with that. (I've never had any 
trouble with them.)

While you are logged in as root, insert the PCMCIA modem and straight 
away type  'tail /var/log/messages'.
The last few messages in you log file should show your PCMCIA modem (and 
its corresponding serial port) being detected and configuration programs 
being run by the kernel. If all worked well, typing 'ls -l /dev/modem' 
should now show a link to the appropriate serial port (something like 
/dev/ttyS1 ).

If that doesn't work, type 'cardctl ident' so that you can at least see 
that your PCMCIA modem has been correctly identified.

If you get this far, you should be half way set up towards getting on 
the Internet. Don't worry about /etc/resolv.conf until you get this far.
You can then use a program such as kppp (the Internet dial-up program 
that comes with the KDE desktop) to configure your Internet connection 
using your PCMCIA modem.

If you haven't had any luck with getting the /dev/modem link being 
automatically configured, it would help to send the output from the 
commands I outlined above. If someone else has the same type of PCMCIA 
modem as yourself, they may be able to help better than I can.

Hope this helps,
Anthony

Disclaimer:
I'm not sure but I think the Community Edition of Mandrake 10 had yet to 
be fully tested and that there may be some bugs in the distro itself.