Thanks to those who offered suggestions. There were some very useful snippets.
I am now also considering Plan B. This would be to get a mainboard without any ISA slots and use a PCMCIA modem with appropriate PC adapter. I have a PCMCIA modem for my laptop and that works very well under Linux.
Can anyone think of any diadvantages with this plan?
Barry Samuels
I want to upgrade my relatively elderly machine ( dual 233 Mhz pentiums) but it will probably mean that I won't be able to use my ISA modem as there are no ISA slots on modern boards. I want to avoid using an external modem.
So I'm thinking of using an even older machine as a firewall/gateway into which I can fit my modem and a network card and then connect to the internet via that.
I am running KDE 1.something and use a little utility called kpppload which displays a small window showing transfer rates in figures and as a graph continuously updated. I would feel lost without this as, if transfers stop, this little window tells me at a glance that rates are down to zero and it gives an indication if transfer rates are slower than they should be.
If I set up this gateway as proposed it will not have X and therefore no little kpppload window.
Is there any way of displaying data transfer rates on a standard console in a similar fashion (the graph is not essential) ?
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Barry Samuels