The Battle for Copper Pair Pass
There are problems, however, as at this point I decided to connect to my dialup account. Having run through pppconfig during installation I expected this to be cake. Unfortunately, when I ran the 'pon' script, I was prompted to execute 'mknod /dev/ppp c 108 0' as root. I would later find from the mailing list that this device node is made by udev when hotplug detects the ppp_generic module being loaded. This module isn't loaded by default, so it must be added to /etc/modules. However, at this point I simply made the node, which also loaded the module, and tried again to connect.
This time the modem dialed, and successfully connected. Unfortunately I couldn't sign into Gaim or resolve a DNS despite properly setting up my static DNS in pppconfig. After some playing I discovered that I had to register my DNS addresses in the Gnome Networking utility (Computer->System Configuration->Networking). Hopefully this will be automated in the future.
Alright, so everything's working properly, but I still have to run 'pon' from a terminal or run dialog. To remedy this right click on the panel at the top of your screen, select 'Add to panel', and choose 'Modem Lights'. Right click the new panel app and change the lock file to your modem device, unless it's ttyS0. For me this is '/var/lock/LCK..ttyS1'. Now run pppconfig to modify your connection, and make sure that your users can all dial out (from advanced options). Log the user out and back in to set the group changes, and you can now launch your PPP connection from the panel.
Obviously PPP connections can run much more smoothly in Ubuntu. However, once configured properly this Gnome desktop is very convenient in this regard. Though I still have a problem where, after disconnecting, I have to run pppd with 'pon' and then 'killall chat' before I can successfully dial again. I thought udev had fixed this, at least it did in Arch, but apparently not here. Please note that this problem is by no means limited to Ubuntu, or even Debian, and I'll most likely be able to work around it in the ip-down script.
Managing a Newfound Power
At some point during this process I halted my computer and discovered a problem here as well. Not only would it not shutdown automatically, but I couldn't briefly press the power button to turn it off like in most distributions where this happens. No, I had to press the power button for a full five seconds, or it would just sit there. Obviously this won't do! Luckily I knew perfectly well that the problem was my BIOS which, being older than 2001, doesn't support ACPI. Instead I added 'apm' in /etc/modules, and everything is perfect in power management land.
The Struggle for Strengthened Vision
Next on the list is the Nvidia driver, which luckily is in Ubuntu's repository. So start synaptic and activate the main/restricted and security repositories. I would suggest not using Universe unless you know you need something from there, as this repository contains unsupported Sarge packages. Refresh your package lists, search for 'nvidia', and install nvidia-glx. The package will be downloaded and installed automatically, but the configuration isn't so straight forward.
Open a terminal and load the nvidia modules with 'sudo modprobe nvidia'. Now that the module's loading has been verified, add 'nvidia' to /etc/modules, and run 'sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86'. You could also manually edit the file, but dpkg will no longer manage it if the md5sum doesn't match. So run through the configuration script, choosing 'nvidia' to the first driver question, and enabling glx while disabling dri and GLcore from the modules list near the end. Unfortunately there's no way to disable Nvidia's splash screen without breaking dpkg's handling of the file. For all the other options, the choices will default to the previous automatic selection except for, I believe, the mouse device section, though I may be mistaken. This would be a good time to disable 'emulate3buttons' if you'd like, and also to ensure that your monitor frequencies are correct (if you know them, otherwise leave them at default which is probably correct, but at least safe). You can now restart your xserver with ctrl-alt-backspace.
