I have installed slack 10 and I have no idea how to connect to the internet. I have verizon dsl any help would be much appreciated. I have looked through other forums and there answers havent been able to help me. I know that it is seeing my network card and in root when i do adsl-start it says conencted but when i logon to x nothing that ahs to do with the net works. Also if i am not loged in as rot adsl-start does not work at all is that normal? thanks.

I use Verizon DSL on Linux and it works perfectly fine. To answer your question, yes, you do need to be root to establish a PPP connection (which is what ADSL uses, via PPPoE). I put adsl-start in the startup script on my router so that the Internet connection starts when it is booted and I don't have to worry about it. If adsl-start is succeeding, chances are you're set to go. If you're having problems, post the results of /sbin/ifconfig -a and try to ping a host on the Internet by name and by IP address (try www.google.com and 64.233.167.99). If you can ping by IP but not name then the issue is with DNS. Verizon distributes DNS server info via DHCP, but this did not work correctly for me when I first set it up. Running 'dhcpcd eth0' (no quotes, assuming your net interface is eth0) fixed the problem for me.

Also: If you're using a router you'll want to set it up to do the PPPoE authentication, then simply configure a DHCP on your computer. Secondly, VOL distributes Westell Model 2200 (if you ordered in the past year, that's probably what you have.) This mdoem must be bridged before any other device can use PPPoE, as it has an internal 1-port router to authenticate for you.
The modem's IP is 192.168.1.1 and the IP it assigns the computer is 192.168.1.47. You'll log into it using your VOL user/pass if you installed the software that shipped with it viz a Win* machine if you dual-boot. If you didn't install the software, your a little better off. Log into the modem using the default user/pass of admin/password, and configure PPPoE in there.