Welcome to LQ.
With a name like eileen, you could be Irish (Like me) so I presume you mean 3, the 3G mobile phone company. This isn't promising, but we can have a go. Open a terminal and run 'lsusb ' and show us what the dongle identifies itself as. Also get onto 3 and ask them about linux support.
When they give you the middle digit, ask them what to they intend to do to serve the expanding netbook/pda market, where linux in some form has a dominant share? Try Eircom, O2, Meteor also.
There is
www.google.ie/linux which searches linux related pages. You can put your dongle brand?model and a word like support, or driver, or module into google and find some answers.
