Quote Originally Posted by garyng
Window you mean 98/ME or XP ? They are different beasts. 98/ME is very crappy. ...
The problem I saw was with XP. Knoppix booted from the CD ran fine and accessed the Internet without problems on a new HP notebook I bought. I would not have had XP, but there was no way to buy the notebook without paying the Microsoft tax. After a few weeks of running XP and Knoppix I finally let XP install the "security updates" it wanted to install. Immidately after doing so I found that I could no longer connect to the network with Knoppix, even though I was booting from the same CD image that previously worked on the hardware. I don't have what I consider absolute proof that it was XP that did this, but I have so far learned that my internal NIC configuration eeprom is now configured in a way that simply makes no sense. Knoppix trusts the configuration information and so the NIC comes up not working. For some reason Windows knows not to trust the eeprom configuration and still works. What earthly reason could there be to not trust the eeprom default configuration unless you knew it was being changed to be non-functional? Strong statements by Microsoft about the need to beat Linux and a history of things in their software from Java and browsers all the way back to deliberate DR-DOS incompatabilities, make it reasonable to conclude that this is not a haphazard accident. Once I posted here about it, several others are confirming that they have seen the same thing; in at least one case it seems to have been from a Win98 security update.

If the evil empire will actually destroy a user's hardware so that it will no longer run Linux, would you put it past them to also have code in connection sharing to be sure they only shared the connection with systems they liked?

Too bad about the USB modem, but that is exactly why I and several of my friends fought with our ISP to be sure we got external DSL modems when we signed up and avoided both the USB modem and the internal DSL modem. Tip for any future subscribers: Tell your ISP you are still using WIN95 (no USB support) and that while you have a built in ethernet connection, you have no available interupts for another card. This seems to be the winning combination to get an external modem, and is a much better argument to make than telling them you simply don't want an internal DSL modem or a USB DSL modem because you know how bad they work, or because you have every intention of adding a DSL sharing device like the Linksys, which needs an Ethernet based connection to the DSL modem. One thing you might want to try is asking amoung your friends to see if anyone has switched from DSL to cable. I know several people who have, so I could easily put my hands on a couple of unused external ethernet based DSL modems if I had a need for them. You may find that you could too if you ask around.

And does anyone know if the USB DSL modem is supported in Linux? I would think that there would be support by now, but simply have not had to find out and so don't know. At least we finally know what the configuration is; it's a shame that this information wasn't provided up front - it would have saved a lot of time.