[Lancaster] Linux with dialup?

[Mark Williams]

From: Ken Walton ken.walton at carandol.net
Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2009 17:59:04 +0000

> What he really wants is something that has everything he needs on the
disk,
> so that the less installing of stuff via the internet he has to do, the
> better.

From: andy baxter andy at earthsong.free-online.co.uk
Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2009 20:06:32 +0000

> If DSL is really that close to debian (does mark or anyone else know?)
> you could install from a DSL disk, but download the Debian CDs for
[edit]
> In principle, this should work OK - the apt-get command automatically
> checks for library dependencies before installing stuff, so if a program

On reconsideration it was silly to suggest a minimal distro that doesn't give
you the option of KDE or Gnome by default. DSL _is_ built on Debian [ +
Knoppix], but you have to add a couple of optional pkgs to get apt & synaptic,
and then get the rest of the stuff you want, so silly++.

More importantly, I suspect that your friend might have Winmodem(s), which Puppy
might have detected and had drivers for, but that Mint didn't (I know that some
Winmodem drivers weren't available as default in some distro's later 2.6
kernels). If it's an external serial-port modem then it's a proper hardware
modem which is ok with Linux, but if it's on-board, PCI, (or pcmcia I suspect),
then it's almost certainly a Winmodem for which support under Linux is patchy
(dependant on chipset and kernel version). The job of finding which current
distros support a given Winmodem might best be done by trial and error (unless
you can lookup a driver against distros, ie against their standard kernel(s)),
as references to a particular chipset are likely to be mostly from people trying
to use an unsupported combination. Buying a used external modem on ebay would be
one way to go (Psion did a mini one if the laptop gets taken out), or as mp
suggested :-
> Maybe a neighbour with WiFi? To share or to "borrow" :)

Mark