I installed Corel Linux last night, and I had a helluva time getting my modem and soundcard configured. After consulting Brad, I at least got my soundcard working (thank you Brad). There’s a nifty util called sndconfig that automatically installed it (or something…I’m not exactly sure what it did). It was hell getting my modem to work, though. It’s a U.S. Robotics 56K internal (ISA), and for some reason, though I had specified the correct settings, the dialer couldn’t initialize it. I checked the config file, and the COM port and IRQ were set properly, but by playing around, I found a util called setserial, which I used to manually set the COM port and IRQ to what (I thought) had already been set, and it worked. At least I could dial in to my ISP. As soon as I connected, I got the error message, “The pppd daemon died unexpectedly!” I tried using the debug option to see what was wrong, but for some reason it couldn’t open the logfile. After booting into win98, getting on the internet and searching for a fix, then booting back into linux several times, I finally got it to work. It took me about 7 hours total to get everything working to my satisfaction.
So anyhow, I added a screenshot of my linux desktop just below the win98 desktop over there on the left. Nifty, eh? 🙂