Need help with laptop/linux/dialup

I have a Compaq R3000. When I lived in the city and had broadband, I installed several Linux distros on it, and they all worked. I didn't even have trouble with Slackware.

Now I live in the country where broadband is not available, and I can't even get a line-of-sight for satellite internet. It's dialup or nothing, and there's where I've run into a problem. This system has a built-in Agere AC97 softmodem. It works with Mepis 3.4 through 6.5 ... sometimes.

I'd just buy a serial hardware modem, but there's no RS-232 port. There may be a USB hardware modem that would work, but it's hard to tell which one - and many of them are actually Winmodems/softmodems even if they don't say it on the box.

Any ideas? I really like Linux much better than Windows, even XP.

 

Check these:
http://archives.linmodems.org/243*
http://archives.linmodems.org/24378
http://archives.linmodems.org/24379
http://archives.linmodems.org/24381

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?t=375618

Good Luck

Peace,
poor_old_dad

 

wow ! Thats tough, I would move back to the city immediately. I just could not survive on 56k anymore it would be a disaster and would drive me completely insane (no I am not yet completely insane, it's everyonelse).

My advice is move back to civilisation (that is wherever there is enough resources to get broadband

 

Well, my 87 year old mother is most adamantly not moving, and I'm not going to leave her here to fend for herself so I can have broadband.

I dropped back in revisions to Mepis 3.4 and have the modem working now. It says it's connecting at a little higher rates than Windows reports, but it's loading pages really, really slowly. No idea why. So, for now, I'm running XP with AVG, Ad-Aware, and Spybot and keeping my fingers crossed.

 

I would assume here youre using Conqueror because thats a big problem with kde. get firefox as a web browser it will make a big difference.

If you are already using firefox then maybe you should get one of the fan base cutdown versions for dialup users - I dont have a url for that right now but some firefox geeks rebuilt it and took out all the crap specifically for dialup users - url when I get time