Thursday 5 March 2009

AOL on PCLinuxOS

Still having problems with the eciadsl driver for the Voyager 105 modem I use to access AOL broadband. It generally hangs first time Linux is booted with the message:-

[EciAdsl 4/5] Connecting to provider...

If CTRL-C is pressed and the driver restarted then it starts fine. The problems seems to be that ppp (or pppd) cannot use channel zero and subsequent restarts uses another channel number usually greater than zero. There have been several fixes published on the web but none of them seem to help. I have thus come up with a fix of my own although it isn't very pretty it does seem to work. So login as root and find the following file:-

rc.local

and add the line:-

eciadsl-start

and save it. Log back in as your normal user name then open your home folder and show all hidden files. Go into the .kde/autostart folder and create a shell script as follows:-

#!/bin/sh

konsole -e /usr/bin/eciadsl-stop
konsole -e /usr/bin/eciadsl-start

and save it. Give it permission to execute. Reboot Linux.

This has the effect of attempting to start the eciadsl driver once Linux has booted which will fail. When KDE loads the script will auto start, close the driver and restart it. This should have the effect of starting the driver with a channel number greater than zero. It isn't a perfect solution but it does seem to work. Hopefully an upgrade to ppp or pppd in the not too distant future will make this unnecessary.