Hi, thanks for your input on the following problem. I have a Sharp PC 9040 laptop, 24 Megs Ram, 1Gig harddrive. Modem is a US Robotics XJ1288 - it is not a Windmodem - . Monday, I installed Mandrake 6.1 on it with, at first, very few problems. I was able to connect to my ISP using kppp in only two attempts and after setting the nameservers right I was able to surf the net. Tuesday I decided to reinstall KDE to fix the nasty pixmap problem and the various related crashes. I then delete all kinds of packaged that I didnt really need using kpackage and making sure not to break anything. Wednesday I decided to fix the sound by running sndconfig with no results. It claims that the device /dev/dsp is busy for sb.o. I cant reproduce the exact message right now. Well I then decided to give linuxconf a spin and try to get my ppp connection going and resolve all kinds of other little issues with the system. Since then I wasnt able to reconnect to my ISP again. kppp insists on: Modem does not respond. Trying to initialize or reset the modem in kppp is of no success. linuxconf does find the modem - sometimes - and after a 30-45 second delay. /var/log/messages says something about: chat: alarm chat: FAILED which, I guess, means that it at least tried. Then I tried minicom and I am able to get a connection to the ISP in minicom but it is really sluggish and somehow seems totally out of sync. I have varied each and every parameter (Hardware flow control, 8N1, baudrates etc.) I can not find any deterministic behaviour. And now comes the strangest behaviour I 've ever seen, when I hold down the control key kppp is able to recognize the modem but then hangs on the initialization. What on earth is going on here ? Do I really have to find the modem handbook to do a factory reset ? Any ideas are highly appreciated. Lost in cyberspace Roland PS: I have disabled sound and removed all the modules in order to avoid a possible IRQ conflict, there is nothing unusual in /proc/interrupts.
