PPP daemon has died

[Jonathan Crowe <jcrowe@eskimo.com>]

Hi folks.

I installed Debian (Ham) from Linux Central cd's about a week ago.   So
far I have managed to bumble along through configuring X and such.  I
now seem to be stuck however.

I have got wvdial set up so that it dials my ISP and logs in.  However
as soon as it starts pppd it comes right back with a message saying PPP
daemon has died (exit code = 1).

When I try to start up pppd from the root prompt I get a message saying
"This system lacks kernel support for ppp."

This seems straight forward enough however when I installed the system I
made sure to choose ppp in the configure modules section of the
install.  ( in fact I even reinstalled ) I  choose the "home machine"
preconfigured setup.

I figured that I would try to compile a new kernel but /usr/src/linux
only has one dir in it ( include) where my book says that I should find
the whole kernel.  I tried make config and make menuconfig but got
messages saying " No rule to make target."

I have gone through the packages in dselect a couple of times but have
not been able to find the package that has a kernel in it.  Does debian
include a kernel in their distribution?

A clue or two would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Jon