[lug] no cable access, what about DSL?

[Michael J. Hammel]

The cable service to my apartment doesn't support cable modems, so I have
to go with some form of DSL.  What are my options here?  I've looked at
USWest's page, though it goes out of its way to say they don't support
Linux (which doesn't suprise me - they barely support POTS).  I've also
looked at Covad, Jato and Rhythms.  All of them appear to be able to
support DSL to my home (probably all through US West, unfortunately).  

How does this external modem work?  I mean, once I get it, I plug it into
the phone line (and add those microfilters to my voice lines) and then
run an RJ45 from the modem into a NIC in my Linux box, right?  I turn on the 
modem, and I'm online?  The modem, I take it, acts as a router?   What kind 
of NICs can I expect from any of these services?  Is there a DSL HOWTO or
is this really pretty straight forward?  I'm just paranoid about ordering
the service only to find some stupid Windows specific crap that won't work.
I don't have any Windows stuff ("...and it'll be a cold day, blah blah"), so I 
can't boot into Windows to configure the modem, if thats one of the 
requirements.  Is configuring the modem necessary?  If so, how do you 
configure the modem?  Telnet into it?

After this, I guess I can then set up my Linux box with firewalling and as a
gateway for the rest of my home LAN.  Can someone tell me if this is about
right.  Also, let me know if you have any preferences with DSL providers.
If I go with USWest I can stick to my ISP (Dimensional), but I know some folks 
here have gone with Flashcom and Peak2Peak (I think thats their name).
-- 
Michael J. Hammel                               The Graphics Muse 
mjhammel at graphics-muse.org                      http://www.graphics-muse.com
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