Okay, I made a mistake. When I set up Debian on my home machine, I was thinking in terms of a home network and so set up networking (through eth0). Unfortunately, I got ahead of myself and don't have everything set up. Specifically, I didn't have internet access handled.
I did set up wvdial during the installation process. It works. I'm able to connect to the ISP. However, I can't get a DNS reading (i.e., I can't ping anything successfully). The Gnome ppp dialer (where you can specify the DNS addresses of the ISP) consistently gives an error message. Does anyone know (or can you direct me) to where I should "disable" networking so that I can get DNS through my ISP and otherwise get on the 'net? Just a sample /etc/init.d/networking and /etc/resolv.conf (or other files) might do the trick. TIA, Ron ./.