[ale] BellSouth on Linux

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Sun, 2005-12-18 at 10:33 -0800, Mark B wrote:
>
>  I am sincerely asking for help.  I am a Linux newbie.   I currently
> have win 2000 and want to raze my hard drive and install  Linux. I
> want to sign up for BellSouth dialup, and use Linux exclusively as my
> o/s.  However Bellsouth insists they don't support Linux.  Surely
> there is a way around this.  Any suggestions and input on how to do
> this?  Thanks very much for any help you can provide.  
> 

I could be wrong, but I do not believe that there are any ISPs that
"actively" support systems such as Linux or *BSD (other then OS X).
Typically, this means that you're on your own for the configuration of
the computer to get online, but, they'll still support connection issues
for their provided access (e.g., in the case of say, a cable modem,
something like "I'm not getting block sync" or whatever).  I'm not sure
if you're talking about xDSL or actual narrowband dialup Internet,
however, if you go with xDSL, it's very easy to set up:  Get a router
that will maintain the connection for you, and just hook up the Linux
box to the router.  Assuming that the router is configured to manage
internal DHCP by default, it will "just work" in most cases, depending
on the distribution you use, of course.

If you're talking about narrowband dialup, someone else will need to
step up and help, as it's been years since I've used such a
configuration and I honestly haven't kept up with the changes in how all
of that stuff works in today's distributions.  I remember that back in
the 90s when I used it last, you had to jump through a million hoops to
get it running.  :-P  I'm sure that's probably changed by now with many,
if not all, distributions.

	Later,
	Mike

-- 
Michael B. Trausch                                     fd0man at gmail.com

"Why geeks like computers: unzip, strip, touch, finger, grep, mount,
fsck, more, yes,fsck,fsck,fsck,umount, sleep."  :-)
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