I've got my PCMCIA modem dialing now. In DOS,with the old win31 terminal program, I can dial up my university ISP, and connect to a login prompt.
Under Linux, when I dial in with wvdial, the login prompt screen flashes by without giving me time to enter text. The pppd takes over and starts dialing again. Pppd can't connect, at least so far. tail -f log says something wrong with 8 bit, etc. Sorry, I have to leave it like this for now; because I've got to go over to linux box to try to connect and get exact error message.