Jacques, Thank you again for taking time out of your day to respond. I greatly appreciate that you've updated your website. Thank you. Step-by-step instructional recipes with caveats, explanations, a level of glossing, and troubleshooting tips seems to work best for me. Loose explanations that assume I'll understand everything else about modem dialing protocols, etc. are less useful. I can 'read the _ manual' from here until the cows come home, but that doesn't mean I'll understand it or what it necessarily implies. For instance, it's probably moot, but I still have no idea what shh or chat are when it comes to the modem-speak from the wvdial and associated man pages. They're referred to in the man pages, but not really explained. The reader is supposed to already know what they are. And unfortunately google doesn't have a 'find-what-I-mean' button. The term 'chat' has many connotations that far outweigh the importance of the unique connotation I seek, even when searching with associated terms. Many times, it seems that man pages are circularly referential. ===== typical man page foray - am I wrong? <grinning> ===== $ man that Name: that - mechanism that leverages synergies of your cpu's fractual slimboid morpholytic spugerfritzen... that --foo | --bar blah blah blah... -- foo - edits your foo setting -- bar - edits your bar setting See faq: http://mybad.-.a.cyber.squatter.took.my.site/ See also: 'this'. $ man this Name: this - protocol used by that - mechanism that leverages synergies... this --boo | --far blah blah blah... -- boo - edits your boo setting -- far - edits your far setting See also 'that'. Here's an excellent example of what I find useful, and though it's a different venue, I learned a lot here: http://www.reprojected.com/geoblog/how-tos/gis-on-a-shared-hosting-environment-the-magic-of-not-having-root/ If page wrapping breaks the link: http://tinyurl.com/p6ggs5 You're right, the machine is not exactly zippy, even with Jaunty or Lenny. :) However, both distros are yards ahead when the machine freezes, so that a newbie could just reboot and let the machine attempt to recover from its problems. It's not been so easy with previous distros. And the machine seems fast enough to write an office doc or surf the web on ethernet without much effort. I'm in awe that such excellent software is available to just download and install. I'm curious - do _you_ think the user experience would suffer appreciably enough on a PIII 800MHz 192MB RAM, Dell Optiplex GX110, that there would be painful waits while web pages render if I could get this modem to work? Chris Jacques Goldberg wrote: > Chris, > > I do not wish to start a useless thread on the virtues and problems of > Linux. > > wvdial is distributed with the man files and even if some link in there > is missing, they do answer any question- which > > I however you almost never need to ask. > > I had not noticed that the link to the original wvdial page is bad. I > have corrected for that, and added a few tips, in > > http://linmodems.technion.ac.il/wvdial.html which I had written very > long ago. > > Sometimes, some programs are good, so the fast appearance of new > versions is not necessarily a proof of software quality. > > If you have suggestions to improve > http://linmodems.technion.ac.il/wvdial.html , please write them to the > list, I will consider them and accordingly improve the file. > > > Jacques > > > chris@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote: > >> Hi Jacques, >> >> Thanks for your reply. 'man' can be a great tool - I agree. >> Unfortunately all too often, the resultant man pages are unintentionally >> more cryptic to end-users than their creators may imagine, >> even for those who have a modicum of bash experience. >> >> Further, with time, faqs and web references within the man page >> change, become 404, are sometimes even misleading, >> or become no longer entirely relevant. >> >> Unfortunately, this seems to be the case with wvdial's man page. >> The web-referenced FAQ and other urls are no longer available. >> >> One can google endless references to wvdial - especially various >> versions of the man page, but the actual home page is now >> hosting a cyber-squatter waiting for original owner to buy >> back the domain for what is likely to be a ridiculous ransom, >> and wikipedia suggests that no new releases >> have been made since July, 2007 - almost two years ago. >> >> I know that there are proprietary portions of the software that have to >> be >> compiled by the user, but I seem to remember installing a couple earlier >> linux distros and using the modem without problems, without the "make >> dance" or configuration. Unfortunately none of those distros seemed >> mature >> enough to hand over to a total noob and expect it to recover itself when >> something goes kerflooey. Jaunty and Lenny both seem to recover quickly. >> >> From a 'sour-grapes' point of view, I begin to suspect modem emulation >> might take enough of a toll on cpu crunch-time to seriously hamper a >> reasonable dialup web-surfing experience on an 800MHz PIII. >> >> Perhaps at this point, perhaps I should see if I can find a used >> non-winmodem-style PCI modem. >> >> I greatly appreciate your response and Marvin's bending over backward to >> help me. >> >> Chris >> >>
