h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm helping a friend get his SuSE machine online... We tracked down the RPM for the Alcatel Speedtouch USB DSL modem, and it registers as having been installed, but the "DSL Config" applet supplied with KDE3 defaults to eth0 (his Realtek network card) as the device to configure. Does anyone have any clue what the device designation for the Alcatel might be?

I had a browse through /dev/, and there was nothing relevant starting with "al", "sp" or "st".

The really irritating thing is that we have to boot into Windows to access the web, then we download patches and reboot into Linux to install them. Only then does it say "for installation instructions see h t t p : / / ..." - if we could see web pages we wouldn't need the patches!

(Plea to developers - if you're developing something to enable web connectivity, *don't* put the documents on-line! At least have enough info in a text file with the package to let the user get on-line in the first place...)

a lot of modems end up as tty or cua type devices, so you will probably have to treat it as a ppp dialup connection.

you might also look in the isdn howto for other devs it might be using.

sorry I can't help more, but I don't use either suse or dsl.

Have you checked out the Linux USB pages as device naming in USB has to be dynamic (it's all hot plugable). If you do get a static device name may you have to do a makedev to build the correct one?
Just a couple of thoughts to be going on with

I'm hoping to find a solution I can communicate over the 'phone...

The machine's at my friend's house, and he's never succeeded in compiling a package from source, even with automatic scripts, so I guess makedev is a bit out of his league. SuSE provides a GUI for setting up a DSL connection, but it defaults to using the LAN adapter.

Not sure what to suggest then. Have you checked the SuSE pages for any information about the problem?

I don't have SuSE here, and the "man" pages didn't help when we were trying to set it up. I haven't scoured their site yet, though (just lazy, I guess) - I'll do that after lunch.

Peet, just done a quick check and SuSE do have a page on how to set up the DSL router ( http://sdb.suse.de/en/sdb/html/configSpeedTouch.html ). There are a few other pages that may be usefull as well at http://linux-usb.sourceforge.net/SpeedTouch/howto.html and http://www.linuxdude.co.uk/docs/Alcatel-Speedtouch-USB-mini-HOWTO/

Isn't google good

Thanks, Phil!