Dear Ubuntu Developers:

People still use dial-up modems.

Regards,
Brad at Goodbye, Microsoft

I spent some time Friday helping a friend who lives in the boonies to install a new modem. His only broadband option is ferociously expensive, so he's still using dial-up Internet access, and his old USB modem died. He was savvy enough to not buy a USB winmodem; instead, he bought a US Robotics USB hardware modem -- the kind that works with Linux. It appears to the computer as a standard USB serial port connected to a standard serial modem.

Because his Windows system is acting erratic, he asked me also to bring along a Linux distro that I could install on his system. Since he's running Windows 7, I knew he had enough CPU, RAM, and hard disk to run any Linux distro. So, I burned Ubuntu 11.10 to a CD-R at home, and took it with me for the visit.

Big mistake.

Somewhere along the line, the Ubuntu folks decided that the entire world has broadband access. So they don't bother including the all-important dial-up package, GnomePPP, in the distribution. Because you can install it from the repository, right? Wrong. Without that package, we couldn't connect to the Internet using his modem. And without an Internet connection, we couldn't download the package. Catch-22.

Fortunately I had a Plan B. Previously I had given my friend an SMC Barricade router, which can use a dial-up modem to connect to the Internet. And I had brought along a spare external modem. So we connected the external modem to the router, the router to the computer's Ethernet port, and with a little bit of configuration, we were on-line.

Then came my second mistake: I tried to install GnomePPP. I could have predicted this if I was thinking clearly. When you try to install something from the Ubuntu repository, naturally the first thing Ubuntu does is to update its repository index. 16 megabytes later, it was still pulling in data, so I called it a night and told my friend to wait for the modem's RX LED to stop glowing, and then shut down the computer.

The moral of the story: Ubuntu is for broadband users only.