On 30 Sep 2000, at 11:24, Alicia da Conceicao wrote:

> (I wonder if AOL has any Linux
> users?)  
> 
> Any advice would be greatly appreciated, since it would save me $$$ by
> avoiding having to call my Toronto POP long distance from my hotel
> room, which I have done a few times in emergencies.

Hi, 

from the Linux Documentation Project at 
"http://ldp.atnet.at/HOWTO/ISP-Hookup-HOWTO-8.html":

--- Schnipp ---
AOL is not possible since AOL uses a proprietary protocol. 
--- Schnapp ---

That may be outdated as well as the following information:

I used Compuserve for a couple of years. They should have local 
POPs in about 200 countries worldwide, and (at least until dec. 1999 
when I cancelled) it was possible to connect to them using Linux 
PPP (last I did try that was about may 99, after being taken by AOL 
that may have changed). The connection is not ideal for everyday 
internetaccess (a little bit slow) but will suffice if used for pop/imap 
mail access. I had no problems to connect to them from several 
places in europe, south- and central americas, africa and middle 
east, just changed the phone numbers and everything worked. 

They used to have tryout offers where you got one month free of 
charge accounts, so you might want to test that. If you do so, please 
search the web in advance (search engine with something like 
"+Linux +CompuServe" to get dial-in scripts for Linux and adapt 
them to NetBSD) because they used some "strange" connect 
modes, that is the login was done with a 7N0 setting and switch to 
8N1 for the connection itself after login.

HTH

mike