1. Enter > startx to enter Linux's GUI.
2. If the Control Panel is not displayed, move the mouse pointer to somewhere on the background (i.e. the desktop) and press and hold the left mouse button. Move to the Administration > Control Panel option, and release the mouse button.
3. Select the Network Configuration button.
4. See the four buttons at the top of the window - entitled: 'Names'; 'Hosts'; 'Interfaces'; and 'Routing'. These flick you through various pages. The only thing that may cause you inconvenience is the Nameservers box on the 'Names' page. You must enter your 'Primary DNS IP address' in here. If you don't know yours, you will have to phone your ISP. An IP address has the following format:
???.???.??.?
...where each ? represents a number.
5. You do not need to edit anything in the Hosts page for a Dial-up connection.
6. In the Interfaces page, click the Add button. Select Interface Type 'PPP' (unless your provider specifically recommends SLIP).
7. You will then be prompted for the ISP's phone number, your PPP user-name and your password. Some providers use an encrypted form of password transmission called PAP (Password Authentication Protocol). If yours is one of these, select Use PAP Authentication. To verify this you could phone your ISP. Once your user-name and password is filled in, click the Customise button.
8. A new dialog box called 'Edit PPP Interface' appears. The options on the 'Hardware' Page are vital to the success of you Dial-Up connection. 'Use Hardware Flow Control and Modem Lines' - Every modem I have ever used has supported 'Hardware Flow Control, so unless you know otherwise about your modem, go ahead and select this option.
9. 'Escape control characters' - I have no idea what this does, but it's turned off on my system and that works.
10. 'Abort Connection on Well Known Errors' - On by default, I left it that way, and it works fine.
11. 'Allow Any User to (de)activate Interface' - You must select this option if you want to dial-up while you are not Super-User.
12. 'Line Speed' - I chose '115200' since I have a 56K modem. This is probably a safe setting for any modem slower than that, but if it's an old modem try dropping back to '57600'.
13. 'Modem Port' - The default should be '/dev/modem'. Leave it there, I'll show you how this works in a minute.
14. 'PPP Options' - Leave blank unless you know what you're doing.
15. The 'Communications' page contains some modem commands and support for some scripting in case you get more than a login and password prompt from your provider. Don't change anything here unless you know you need to.
16. On the 'Networking' page, you must select 'Set Default Route When Making Connection'. Don't select 'Activate Interface at Boot Time' - unless you want to dial-up to the Internet automatically every time you reboot the PC.
17. 'Restart PPP When Connection Fails' is self explanatory. I leave it turned off, because my provider hangs up after 30 minutes of inactivity, and I don't want the computer to keep dialling back if I'm not using the connection. The other options are for advanced geeks and should be left alone.
18, The 'PAP' page is for those using this encrypted password protocol. You should have identified yourselves earlier. Since I have never used this, you're on your own here, but the page looks pretty self-explanatory.
19. Finally, click 'Done' and instruct it to save your configuration.
20. There's one more thing we need to do, and that's make sure the system can find your modem. Get out that hardware list you made and see which COM port your modem uses. In the Red Hat Control Panel, click 'Modem Configuration', or run 'modemtool' from a command window. Just pick the appropriate COM port and click 'Ok'. My modem was on COM2: so I picked cua1.
21. Now our PPP connection is configured. To test it, click Start > Applications > Networking > Usernet; or run Usernet from a command window. You should see a button called 'ppp0'. Press it, and voila! Dial-Up connection!
Laurence Hunter
thebits@thebits.co.uk