Friday, December 21, 2007

Life's important questions ...

Does anyone know what port "COM 1" is in Kubuntu/KPPP? For some reason, Kubuntu doesn't seem to be autodetecting my external modem, and I haven't figured out which port to tell KPPP to find it on (there's a huge list which doesn't include "COM 1").

This question brought to you by Susan Hogarth, who just gifted me my first reasonably modern computer (a 1.4 GHz Shuttle PC) in forever, which was delivered by Bev Wilcox on her way through St. Louis taking her granddaughter Kennedy to see the Anasazi cliff dwellings in New Mexico. We had a nice little day yesterday, touring the old courthouse in St. Louis (the place where Dred Scott won his freedom before Taney's US Supreme Court took it away) and then having lunch (Hunan-style buffet, per Kennedy's extremely wise choice). Thanks to Susan for sending the machine, and thanks to Bev for a dropping it off and just for dropping by with a smart kid.

But anyway, back to the machine: It works, and its Windows XP partition recognizes the modem just fine. The other partition was an old Suse distro which didn't even recognize my mouse for some reason. I've had my Kubuntu install CD for some time, and was waiting breathlessly for a computer I could install it on. But I can't connect to the intarweb with it until I get it to recognize that modem (I don't like to spend much time on the Net when running Windoze -- matter of fact, the only reasons I didn't trash the XP partition are that my kids want to play games and my significant other has yet to recognize the clear superiority of OpenOffice over its Microshaft Ohfiz equivalents).

I may try a re-install of Kubuntu tonight, or else retreat to a distro I'm more familiar with like Xandros or Vector. I'm really hot and bothered to get the new machine in action. This old box I'm using now is a 650MHz P3 with 128Mb of RAM -- unimaginably fast and huge ten years ago, reasonably well-equipped when I got it in 2003 or so, completely antiquated now.

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