at&t DSL?

[jmadero]

Hi All,
I just had a frustrating conversation with an ATT rep and was hoping to get better advice on here. My mother is finally switching over to high speed but has a slightly older system (and I see no reason for her to upgrade, basically checks email and surfs the web a little). I bought her 512 megs of RAM and she is currently running windows ME. I was hoping to switch her over to Ubuntu but the ATT people said that their DSL will not work with Ubuntu and that's because "there is no demand", that's what pissed me off the most. They told her to go pay $100 for an XP upgrade which would obviously lag on a system designed for ME...now the question....does anyone know if there is a way to get Ubuntu to work with ATT DSL....I almost told them to go....but decided that would be a bad path to take. Thanks all

[coopstah13]

this response is pretty typical of a person who has no idea about linux, etc, and how to configure their net to work with it, pretty much any dsl/cable can be configured to work with linux. Why don't you try downloading a livecd of ubuntu and see if you can get the net to work? If you can then it sounds like you'd be in business to do an install.

[jmadero]

my guess is at&t has some proprietary software the logs in to their network....if this is the case I'm not sure how I could get around it. I could try Wine but the problem with Wine is that it's still not up to my standards (I use it sometimes and see pretty big memory losses at times, I have 2 gigs so I can deal with it, with 512 it would be more burdensome). If it does have software any suggestions how to get around it? Thanks for the advice with the live distro, I was planning that, the thing is I live 600 miles away and only have a couple days to play around with it before I have to return to school....

[oz]

I'm sure they do have their own software they'd like for you to use, but I think their DSL will work with Linux, and you won't need wine. I'd be very surprised to find out otherwise. I'm on Sprint DSL and don't need their software and it works great with Linux. I feel pretty certain the same will apply to AT&T.

[smolloy]

Like you, I live in California, and have been using AT&T DSL for the last few years with my Linux systems. No problem at all. No installation required.

[T3ddy]

Seeing as how Unix was made by AT&T employees, it would be a slap in the face to make some ultra proprietary crap that wouldn't run on some form of *nix.

[bigvoo]

im in california and use att. I have the 2wire gateway which is both wireless and lan enabled. I got right on with the livecd of linuxforum magazine, which surprized me, as i thought i might have to tweek at least a few things, but it went straight to the ubuntu support page, and from there i went to all my firefox favorites. that being said, I havint been able to get my 7 year old dell laptop with the first versoin of xp online yet. that xbunutu is fully installed as the only OS. but i think i rushed through the set-up and left out the network setup part.

[Agent-X]

Seeing as how Unix was made by AT&T employees, it would be a slap in the face to make some ultra proprietary crap that wouldn't run on some form of *nix.

Agreed.
In linux, networking protocols can be broken down into routines. In the end, you ought to be able to create a script and mix it with some properties of a kernel if everything else goes down the drain.

[GMorris]

I still haven't tried Ubuntu, but I managed a Slackware install on an OLD computer. Last night, I somehow got connected to the AT&T Worldnet DSL service, but now I can't remember how I did that. I even went so far as to look through my history (command line) to see if I'd forgotten something, but for some reason it just wouldn't work like it did last night. I get all of the lights, Ethernet, DSL, and even internet, but even with the activity light flashing, I can't get into the modem or anything now. All I can remember is I was trying different things and *BOOM* all of a sudden I had a login prompt through Lynx, which I then filled out and had instant access. I just can't remember what I did to get there in the first place...

[jmadero]

How To Install Yahoo DSL without CD | Bui4Ever.com | Richard Bui

Hope that helps, got my mom's up with no problem at all.