Help for Dial-up Users?

An article by a compassionate person: "Help people without broadband around the world."

As a dial-up user, I can't download Linux like people with fast connections do, so I order Linux CDs. Doesn't cost much; but one reason I continue to include Ubuntu on my system is that Ubuntu ships CDs worldwide, for free. They even pay the postage.

As far as I know, Ubuntu is the only distro that does this. It has to be quite expensive. But I'll bet that it has a lot to do with why Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distro out there.

I'm sure there aren't many folks out there who have a high-speed connection and would be willing to help out dial-up users in the way that the article suggests. But Linux dial-up users stick together and help each other out. I'm not the only one who drops in at Linux forums to help out other dial-up users.

We get lots of fun comments. "I thought dial-up went out with the dinosaurs." "Get a high-speed connection." "I was a dial-up user, years ago... got broadband and never looked back!"

Problem is, for a number of reasons, not everyone can get a high-speed connection. And, that's okay. Many of us are doing fine without it.

But we're here, and we quietly continue to use Linux. We struggle with it, sometimes. Ubuntu doesn't make it so easy to connect to the internet via dial-up, and I've heard that the latest releases might make things even more difficult. KDE distros like Mepis do make it easy, but Mepis dial-up users have been having a problem with kppp, the dial-up connection tool, which freezes up the Mepis 8.0 system upon disconnection -- a problem that, at this writing, has not been fixed (or even addressed) by Mepis developers. (I've gotten around this problem by installing the GNOME dial-up tool, gnome-ppp, but while this has worked fine for me, at least one Mepis user reports the same freeze-ups occurring with gnome-ppp.)

The good thing is, there are ways to get Linux without a high-speed connection; and once you've got it, it's usually possible to connect to the internet. We may not be able to download music and video like everyone else, but we can send emails, browse the internet, participate in Linux forums, and... blog.