[clue-tech] Juno for Linux.

[David Anselmi]

FWIW, I was looking for a cheap dial-up ISP for a non-technical 
relative.  Juno/Netzero have a Linspire client that turns out to be 
pretty easy to run on Debian.

The client comes as a .deb.  The dependencies are easily available in 
Debian, though it didn't list Java (Debian has a packager to build debs 
from Sun's stuff).

I have 3 criticisms:

It has to run as root (hangs otherwise, though the logs give a hint that 
it isn't dialing).  setuid on the PPP code doesn't cut it, nor does a 
user with write access to /dev/modem.

The Java fonts are small (and the command line properties to set them 
don't seem to change anything).

The PPP program writes its own ip-up script that doesn't hook ip-up.d 
(so you can't wire in your iptables stuff to go up and down 
automatically).  Actually, strings shows the entire script in the body 
of the PPP executable so it may be possible to modify it there (almost 
certainly if you don't change the length of the data, but maybe even 
otherwise if it's just a null terminated string).

The web site says you can't distribute the .deb (only available to the 
$10/mo customers, not the free ones).  I wonder whether it works with a 
free account.  It's just PPP (chat no less) under the hood.  And maybe 
any of the PPP clients would work (for free accounts that would bypass 
the ads, although the Juno PPP keeps its phone list updated 
automagically).  I also wonder whether there's any GNU source in their 
PPP that they should be distributing.

I've heard that people have made this work with SuSE as well.

Yeah, Juno sucks compared to FRII and Techangle.  But it's cheap.  And 
it's always fun to make unsupported things work.

I see that Fry's offers $10/mo dial-up in Colorado now too.  I wonder 
how "just plain PPP" that is.

Dave