Dialing up without xwin running?

[Glitchman]

Out of curiosity, I wanted to see if I could dial up to the Internet after closing out of xwin. I figured, if I can dial up in pure MS-DOS, then surely I can do something similar here. So I copy-pasted a line from a successful xeznet connection, and saved it for reference:

/usr/sbin/pppd /dev/modem 115200 connect '/usr/bin/eznet chat 0' defaultroute lock modem mtu 552 mru 552 crtscts -detach idle 300 user [snipped for obvious reasons]

Anyway, I typed it all in at the command prompt, and sure enough it dialed up and connected successfully! One slight problem though: I'm still stuck in interactive mode, and thus cannot type any further commands or launch the links browser. So I had to hit Control-C to abort, which of course disconnected me. So my question is this:

What do I need to do to get back to a prompt after dialing up? I have a feeling it's just something simple that I am missing. Thanks in advance.

[GuestToo]

if you put an ampersand after the command, it should run as a background process

/usr/sbin/pppd ... stuff ... 300 user &

you can often make a job a background process by pressing ctrl+Z (command line Linux, unlike dos, can multitask)

[Glitchman]

Awesome. The ampersand did the trick. I'm posting this from Links2 in text mode without the presence of X. It sort of has the feel of running Lynx in pure MS-DOS, but with real multitasking. Thanks again for the tip.

On another note, would it be possible to run this in an 80*50 display, as opposed to the standard 80*25? I had a method of doing this with Lynx by crashing QuikView for DOS (a picture/movie player, available as a plug-in for the Arachne browser.) Doing this would force an exit to an 80*50 display. Crude, but effective.

[Bruce B]

The DOS command for setting the 80 cols 50 lines is:

mode con: cols=80 lines=50

I don't know if these settings will cause Puppy to carry this setting for you. You can try it.

[Glitchman]

Puppy does not appear to recognize the mode command. Hopefully there is something similar.

Anyway I just wanted to point out that dialing up without X running has some great advantages from what I have noticed so far:

1. My dial-up connection remains active while I start xwin and exit back out. (It's similar to when I'd connect via Trumpet in Windows 3.11 and still maintain my connection even after restarting Windows or rebooting.) Very nice.

2. Even if I change the video resolution (despite my extremetly limited options), the dial-up connection remains intact. Another big plus.

Quite frankly, I see no reason to start a dial-up connection from inside xwin anymore, given these advantages. This rocks.

[BarryK]

Puppy 1.0.4 *may* have framebuffer support for console mode, meaning other than 80x25 will be available.

[Guest]

Set up the pppd config files than all you have to type is


#pppd call ISPNAME
and pppd will background itself

#killall pppd

will hang up for you