UK Newbie and Broadband
 

I am looking to swap my Windows based system for Linux, but am concerned that I will have trouble connecting to the internet.

I am based in the United Kingdom and will be running Linux on an AMD Athlon 64 3200+ based desktop.

At present I use AOL as my ISP and connect to broadband gold through a Thomson Speedtouch 330 USB ADSL modem. Will I still be able to connect in the same way with say, Mandrake, SUSE or Xandros?

Any help greatly appreciated.

Their site says the modem is supported by Linux and I found the open source drivers: http://sourceforge.net/projects/speedtouch/. There's also an "embedded firmware" upgrade for Linux on the Speedtouch site.

I would look for an ethernet based adsl modem or modem/router. It seems quite easy to configure an ethernet based adsl modem compared to trying to make the USB versions work with Linux.

A router would be especially useful if you're thinking about getting more machines, too. Speedtouch have a nice modem/router, the 510 :).

And there are many better (and cheaper) ISPs than AOL.

AOL is also possible to use ... try "PENGGY" :) (Worked out for me and may possibly work for you) :P

What I recently did was download Smoothwall Express 2.0 from - http://smoothwall.org/ - (its only 30MB) went out and bought myself an old IBM pentium desktop (20GBP) and a few PCI NIC cards(1 GBP each).

Then following the excellent instructions from smoothwall set up the old IBM machine as a firewall. Smoothwall has support for an Alcatel Speedtouch USB modem which I'm guessing is probably the same as a Thomson.

If this all works you end up with a great firewall (that's Linux based) and takes away the worry about support in whichever linux distro you choose. You can do all this without loosing your current Window$ setup.



BTW I'm not running a speedtouch modem, my ISP gave me a router, but I still use smoothwall.