les wrote: > wireless router might be useful. Has anyone any suggestions as to which > ISP's are most suitable and Linux friendly? One constraint is that it
British Telecom's default supplied wireless router seems to work well with my Dell Ubuntu Linux laptop, but then so does every other wireless router I've connected to. For "beginners" I always recommend BT for ADSL, since if there is a connection problem, they can't blame it on anyone else. Other ISPs, if you get a connection problem, sometimes they try to fob you off saying there's a fault on the line, and that it's BT's fault; BT then come back and say it's the ISP's fault, and so it goes on in circles. Both my parents and my in-laws use BT broadband and have had zero hassle. Once my dad reported a connection problem to BT, it turned out to be water collecting in a cable tray under the pavement over the road, and of course they sent a man out to dig it up and fix it. To be honest, once you've set up the wireless router and the wireless card on the laptop, there is very little other Linux-specific configuration to be done, so I wouldn't worry about an ISP being specifically Linux friendly, not for a beginner who isn't going to run their own servers or so forth. For more advanced users such as myself, I recommend www.SurfAnyTime.com . They're a small ISP based in the Isle of Man, but have very good UK connectivity and bandwidth, very high uptime, offer static IP addresses at no extra cost, have good download limits for the prices, staff understand Linux needs such as running SMTP servers from home, and the staff are happy to "talk tech" direct to customers. Best of all, they have public support forums where the technical staff - including the company director himself - take part and answer questions day in, day out. Doing support in public is great because it makes it easy to figure out whether everyone else is having the same problem as you! Of course there is telephone and email support too if you need a little more privacy (not that email, or telephone for that matter, is particularly private). I also recommend my employer www.names.co.uk but due to my declared interest I won't brag too much. Suffice to say that most of our techs run Linux or Mac/BSD on our desktops at work, so we're definitely Linux friendly. We also have real genuine British call centre support staff, manned until 8pm, with real 01xxx telephone numbers (although we provide 0845 numbers too) actually sitting in England (Worcester), and actually in the same open-plan office as the techs! I can't guarantee the first person you speak to on the phone will be a Linux expert, but the second person... no problem. -- Andrew Oakley -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.kubuntu.org/UKTeam/
