OK, bear with me here, I'm not computer-illiterate, but I am pretty new to Linux.

I'm booting Knoppix from a CD over an old Windows 98 machine. I found instructions on-line as to how to set up my model through KPPP, but I've had no luck. There was a bit of a blurb in the instructions that indicated that some modems were kinder than others, so I'm not necessarily shocked or anything.

Anyway, what I've done so far is opened KPPP and gone through the steps to add a new modem. I set "Modem Device" to each of the choices one after the other, and went to "Query Modem". In each case I got a response that the modem couldn't be opened.

Now I know very little about hardware, so I'm going to list what information I can dredge up in the hopes that someone has had an experience with this. If you've got an idea for me to try, be sure to be detailed -- like I said, I'm quite new to this :)

The modem is an internal 56.6K (V.90) It's a Conexant SoftK56 PCI Modem and the device manager in Windows indicates that it's on COM2. Knoppix in starting up indicated that it did find my ethernet card -- that's old and dates from when I was at college. I don't have ethernet now, but I never bothered to take the card out... is there any possibility of conflict here? (I can't see why there would be, but it's worth mentioning anyway)

Thanks all, in advance. Though I've been itching to play with this for a while, the recent WMF thing is what really brought it to the top of my pile. I'm not ready yet to give up on this old machine, nor am I willing to put my shiny new Mac on the 'net, no matter how much more secure it might be than Windows, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that someone out there will know what to do.