Next Step:
Okay, my girlfriend has been really cranky and has also been racking up some serious long distance bills, calling her friends that she usually IMs. Here's the situation:
Out of 10 modems I find, it's my luck that they're all winmodems with no linux drivers (okay, just 4 modems). I purchased the other modems, and the stupid company required an in-person signature to receive them by UPS. I don't know how many of you are home for more than ten hours per day (including sleep), but I'm definitely not. I tried to fill out the little slip saying to drop it on the ground and walk away, but it was scratched out each time the guy delivered. So, I go during my lunch hour to the UPS station (far from my home AND work) where they decided to leave it. This is 8 days after the supposed delivery time. EDIT: I forgot to mention that I had to ask thrice, and involved two employees of UPS before one woman walked a foot behind an open door and returned with my package. They claimed that I must be in the wrong place or have the wrong name and address. /EDIT I install the modem physically, and after minimal work on the modem device...
Quote:
cat /proc/pci
ln -sf /dev/ttyS4 /dev/modem
|
I'm all set! I tell kppp (the dialer) the information that my girlfriend's mom had gotten when she registered for dialup. I try to dial, and I get garbage tone after garbage tone for 4 phone numbers... I'm visibly distraught. My girlfriend had been without internet for nearly a month and a half, which is like a death sentence for her. I keep trying again and again. More garbage. I get online at work the next day and check every dialup configuration guide I can find. I don't find anything worth printing, and resign myself to show up and have at it yet again. Her friend, Joe, shows up to help her write a story. He's an english major, and has better grammar than me, if you can believe it. And he knows what an antecedent is (hey, I knew, but I forgot! It's the linked noun when you use one of the pronouns like "he" or "it").
I get a brilliant idea. I tell Joe to hook up his laptop to the phone line I was using. He does, and dials. He gets garbage tones. We buy a new cable (it's a shoddy cable job that my gf's dad did - electrician, not phone technician). It's too short (at 25ft), so I buy a fifty-footer. I return. We try again. Garbage. We check the phone line for a dialtone in the area. The phone has a tone, then it doesn't, has a tone, then it doesn't. It's all very odd. We take Joe's laptop upstairs and try in the kitchen. Garbage. We try in three phone jacks in the house. All garbage. Finally, some rest for poor ol' me. It's not my fault.
I tell Tony, gf's dad, that his phone lines inside or outside the house have some problem. SBC (local phone people) tell him that there is no problem. He tells a technician to come out anyway. The guy shows up last night (Sunday night) at 5:15PM (odd time...). I was about 6 blocks away, so I showed up ASAP to talk to him. He told me that there was a device (some bell??) that was hooked up in the basement to ring loudly outside when the phone rang, or something to that effect. He said that it wasn't functioning, but that it sucked up voltage nonetheless. He disabled it, and his modem worked just fine. I tested mine, and while I had some timing problems with kppp, the tones were perfect. I got it working. I had set the modem attempts to 30 seconds max because GF's mom had complained. She said "There are needles in my head! Please stop making that noise!" while I was troubleshooting the day before. Once I set it to 200 seconds, everything worked hunkydory!
GF got on the internet and chose her favorite browser (mozilla -Netscape took forever to load) and her favorite AIM client (gaim). She denied everybuddy, Netscape's AIM client, and some other, if I remember correctly. I trained her parents on how to get on the internet, how to look around, and how to get their email. They are adjusting surprisingly well. I think it's because they didn't know windows at all.
To-Do's:
Get her music and video and picture editing software. - in process, scanning freshmeat.net
Load her HP scanner/printer (with handy linux drivers She made sure when she got it) - next on the list
Learn how to operate firewire and USB gear that she has.
Use next stable kernel (2.4.22?), or upgrade to beta kernel if necessary to do the above tasks. - Having problems, but will resolve. It may involve the second processor
Figure out if drivers exist for her firewire digital video camera that her parents bought her without any knowledge of computers and without consulting me - no idea
Download newest cdrecord tools to enable DVD read/write as a massive CDROM device. It also should get her legacy cdwriter to work.