More about getting an address book to dial the phone

I have installed kppp, and am trying to get it to dial the phone. In going through the configurtion, I was immediately struck by the fact that it never asked me to tell it what port the modem is on, or whether I want it to use tone or pulse dialing. There are two modems in the machine (I have removed one until I get kppp squared away), so even if kppp thinks it knows how to identify a modem, it better ask me which one. Same for dialing method. I can't make the bloody thing dial (and am not surprised, in view of the above). It has told me such things as the following: ***** You don't have sufficient permission to runusr-sbin-pppd. Make sure that kppp is owned by root and has the SUID bit set. ***** This is nonsense. The permissions for pppd have three Xs, and kppp is indeed owned by root, and also has three Xs. Searching for the meaning of the cryptic "SUID" I found that neither "man-info-apropos suid" has anything informative to say about it. This, I have learned, is par for the course, in spite of the exaggerated regard in which these much vaunted facilities are held. In subsequent attempts to dial, I got a dialog box with the breastle bar "ATI Query", and reading "Unable to open modem". I am not surprised that it can't find the modem. The modem, which by the way is on what is called elsewhere COM3, works fine under OS-2 on the same machine. I use it to dial telephone numbers from my address book there. Can someone suggest what might need to be done to get it to work under The OS of the Future, Linux? I had intended to use kppp with kaddressbook. I notice that kaddressbook, like every other similar program I have found has no facility for including an international access code in a single location, so that one would have to consider the access code a part of each individual foreign number. This is extremely clumsy, especially in the event of a change of international service providers. This and other details would be routine in an addressbook designed for use in making telephone calls, rather than keeping track of people's birthdays, hobbies, and the like. I find it difficult to bellieve that any business office is actually using these programs. Yet I have been able to find none more useful for Linux. This seems not to be the kind of need that calls out to the programmers for solutions. It is very hard to be optimistic. -- Stan Goodman Qiryat Tiv'on Israel