Adventures with Freespire Linux

I had a very rewarding time over Christmas and New Year. I helped a friend install and configure a rebuilt PC so that she could surf the Web and receive emails. I had great fun. It is a cooperative project with a friend who has donated his defunct PC with its CPU and peripherals. The hard drive had crashed, and the lady paid for a new one, which I got from Dabs for £35 inc delivery. It was a Seagate 160 GB internal IDE drive. Amazing what you can get for so little cash nowadays. I downloaded Freespire Linux v. 2 and installed it. I chose Freespire, a derivative of Ubuntu, because the company who created it - Linspire - aimed to make it as like Windows as possible. I hoped, and I think justifiably, that the lady concerned (who is not a techie) would find the learning curve minimal.

Then I had the challenge of how to connect it up to the internet. Firstly, I spent upwards of a fortnight at home, getting my USB modem and Pipex connection to talk Linux. Through the help of a nice bloke named Sebastian from http://eciadsl.flashtux.org/, I finally got this to work (albeit re-synchronising the modem each time I connected) and was able to download extra software to the PC. However, the lady concerned is with Talktalk, and they had supplied a far superior MT282 ethernet router. Linux loves ethernet, as you really just have to plug it in and turn the power on. There is no need to "connect to the internet" as you have to with USB. It took me much less time to get the ethernet connection working. Nevertheless, if anyone tells you that you can't use a USB ADSL modem with Linux, don't believe them.