Stupid question?

[John Seago]

Now you've kindly clarified devfs, and I've got sound working. there is 
one problem which is puzzling me. I am running a stand-alone box 
running Slackware and with the FreeBSD on the first disk. I can't get 
the dialer to work properly in KDE, when trying to set up the dialler 
it won't let me select Automatic, it's stuck on Manual, thus it dials 
out and connects but can't do anything else, browse, send or receive!
It's very frustrating, I'm afraid that whilst I have "The Complete 
FreeBSD" I'm not understanding what I'm reading.
-- 
John Seago