[arch-general] [arch-releng] Inclusion of wvdial in the ISO

[Ray Rashif]

On 27 June 2010 01:07, Tobias Powalowski <t.powa at gmx.de> wrote:
> Am Samstag 26 Juni 2010 schrieb Nilesh Govindarajan:
>> On 06/26/2010 05:10 PM, Dieter Plaetinck wrote:
>> > On Sat, 26 Jun 2010 00:22:39 -0600
>> >
>> > jwbirdsong<jwbirdsong at jwbirdsong.homelinux.com>  wrote:
>> >>    On 06/25/2010 11:54 PM, Nilesh Govindarajan wrote:
>> >>> Hi,
>> >>>
>> >>> Recently I've been going to my friends' house and installing arch
>> >>> on their boxes. Some of them had high speed wireless dialup
>> >>> internet (3.1 megabytes/s is the max) which required wvdial, so I
>> >>> had to carry wvdial's package in another pen drive.
>> >>>
>> >>> It would be nice if wvdial was included in the ISO, so such people
>> >>> can have the latest system if they conduct an FTP install.
>> >>
>> >> Maybe CC a copy of this to the arch-releng ML.  Oh wait I just did.
>> >> And perhaps add a feature request to the Release Eng bug tracker/
>> >
>> > As far as I can see, none of the current packages [1] contains a dialing
>> > tool, so looks ok for me.
>> >
>> > [1]
>> > http://projects.archlinux.org/archiso.git/tree/configs/syslinux-iso/packa
>> > ges.i686
>> >
>> > Dieter
>>
>> Yeah. As far as dialing software is considered, I think wvdial is the
>> best one available out there (I don't know if any others exist :D).
>> Here in India, its hard to get Linux support for such wireless internet
>> devices officially from the ISP (It seems they don't like Linux lol),
>> but still some people (geeks) have devised methods using wvdial and
>> usb_modeswitch (if required) to use them.
> archboot images contain ppp to do everything, wvdial is imho not needed.

And such is the case for all other distros; wvdial is not included by
default because it's just a dialer for ppp (chap scripts are what act
as a dialer in absence of a real dialer).

You can wvdial on a working system and keep a backup of the ppp
scripts for use on multiple machines. I myself, however, never went
through so much trouble. It's not so annoying to keep a copy of wvdial
and install it offline.

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/srg/netos/coms/unix.html
http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/T-Mobile_pppd_scripts


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