[Sussex] Winmodem *yuk*

[Geoff Teale]

Guys,

A colleague of mine (Stephen) has purchased one of those Evasham linux
boxes.

We've now been through the first problem (he is uses a very old 14inch
monitor for which he has no manual - it took several hours of internet
trawling last friday night to find the refresh rates, but that done it now
works OK).

However the second problem that occured was tha whenever he dialed his ISP
(virginnet) he got very slow download speed and got cut of after just a few
minutes.  pppd dies unexpectidly and reports error 16.

He's tried with his old external 14.4k modem and everything works fine.

It turns out that the modem Evesham fit is a Win-modem.  Searching the web
again I find that it is possible to fix this with updated drivers.
Apparantly evesham give you these drivers on a CD as well, along with some
instructions that tell you that you will have to rebuild the machine if you
want to install them.

Generally Stephen has found the software and environment pleasant enough,
but he has found Lindows a little inconsistent and the setup problems very
frustraiting.

He is prepared to try another LINUX distro (assuming he can't get his
winmodem working properly with the instructions annd new drivers I found
online).  This machine will be used for the following:

Writing college essays (needs Word file compatibility).
Surfing the web.
Sending and recieveing e-mail.

Key to his satisfaction will be ease of setup (so sorry guys, thats a big NO
to debian or Gentoo), integration of desktop tools and good look and feel.

Currently I've recommended he takes a look at Red Hat 8 or Suse 8.1.  I can
burn him red-hat 8.0 disks if necessary.

Any thoughts?  I'd like his user experience to be a little better from now
on, else he's going to give in an buy a copy of Windows XP (what he was
tring to avoid in the first place).

Frankly I'm not impressed with Evesham's choice of a Winmodem.. that's just
inviting trouble.

-- 
geoff.teale at claybrook.co.uk
tealeg at member.fsf.org

"A man is like a rusty wheel on a rusty cart, He sings his song as he
rattles along and then he falls apart."
     -- Richard Thompson 


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