A few days ago I realized that Ubuntu doesn’t have “direct support” for ADSL modems so after long searching and internal tweaking I found a way to make this two work together without any problems.

I tried all these on the latest distribution of Ubuntu as of 17 Sep 2009 wich is 9.04.

Step 1: Download all these files libatm1, br2684ctl, speedtouch_ng – ZIP

Step 2: Install them in the following order:

All the files are in DEB format so there is no need for the terminal just yet (they work as setup exe files in Windows)

1. libatm1 – it should be a new version already in Ubuntu, if this is the case skip the installation

2. br2684ctl

3. speedtouch_ng – Here you will be presented to enter your credentials and some info about your connection. When prompted what connection type to use be very careful to chose PPPOE / ATM then enter your user name (for example 02141xxxxx@SIP1), your password and the values for VPI/VCI (for Romania are 0.35 – google or check your contract for other countries). Also don’t forget to check Connect at startup option here also.

Step 3: Open a terminal window (Applications – Accessories – Terminal) and enter the following lines:

sudo update-rc.d -f pppd-dns remove
sudo update-rc.d pppd-dns start 39 S .

(Don’t miss the point from the second line)

Step 4: Restart and enjoy …

I also use USB ADSL Modem Manager for Gnome, but it doesn’t work every time. You can get it from here.

UPDATE: A more detailed explanation is here linux-usb.org