Trumpy,
Sorry to hear of your problems with ADSL modem/routers.
My friend Chris just got the standard offering from Telecom, and it worked as soon as we set up the ethernet connection in Suse and then set the internet connection to look at this for the connection. The only tricky bit was that you needed to know that the modem supplies the IP address to your PC and you need to set the PC to expect this. If memory serves me right, this was the default in Suse so we didn't need to change it.
In a similar vein, just before Christmas we got broadband connected at home. Since we now have 3 PCs, we needed a router. Because I was not too keen on grovelling around under the floor installing cables, I bought a D-Link wireless router.
Setting up my Linux machine was simple. I connected it to the router with an ethernet cable, and just as with Suse, Mandrake defaulted to the correct setup once I had enabled the ethernet connection and changed the internet conenction setting from serial-port modem to ethernet.
The wireless caused a bit of fun though. 2.4Ghz radio may not be purely line-of-sight, but a 90 degree bend in the path caused enough loss that my Wife's PC, about 30 feet away, was getting a patchy signal with frequent dropouts. I cured this by fitting a 7dB dipole antenna which seems to have perked things up a bit.
All is working quite well now. Isn't it astonishing how fast the data cap is reached? We settled on 5GB/month but we had used 4 of these within 2 weeks!
Later,
Mark aka Paulus the Woodgnome
