braintubes.com

I set up a machine for someone this week, who is still using dial-up.

I took it on as a challenge, to see if I could still do it.

It was an old P4 1.7 GHz machine. I stuck two old 40 GB drives in it, with 1 GB of RAM.

Not too bad. It’s an old machine, but should suffice for dial-up internet and email.

Since the user was still using Windows 95… they complained of having too many viruses, and their current dial-up would not even connect.

With Microsoft’s Windows 95 support ending years ago… It’s no wonder.

For the replacement machine, I wanted to minimize the events that the user would encounter a virus or some sort of crapware.

For the install I chose Ubuntu 9.10, Karmic Koala.

The install went well, and was done in about 25 minutes.

I pulled out an old 56K modem I had. I plugged in the serial cable… and the power.

After entering “sudo dmesg | grep tty” from the command line, I found the modem active on ttyS0.

I installed wvdial from the command line.

I edited the wvdial.conf, adding the modem on /dev/ttyS0. I also added the username and password.

Next I edited resolv.conf. I looked online to find out the domain and DNS server settings for his ISP.

To finish things up, I created a shortcut to do the dialing, in a quick shortcut on the top bar.

I set the command line shortcut to

gnome-terminal –title=”Dialing the ISP, Click X to close” -e –command=wvdial

This tells the system to open a terminal window, place the title at the top and feed the window the command.

After testing it out, it all seemed to work like clockwork.

In retrospect, I could have easily installed gnome-PPP to simplify the config process.

I could have also used wvdialconf to set up the dial-up connection.

No problems, though. It’s good exercise to do it the long way.

I am reminded of the scene from ‘Karate Kid’, in which Daniel is frustrated with doing so many seemingly pointless chores.

Not only was he building character, but he was developing skills and learning things he never thought possible.