According to Brian Doob:
I just moved to an apartment where I'll be getting MTS ADSL (Shaw High Speed is not available). How do I set up Linux to use it? I know you need to use PPPoE, but I don't know how to do that. I have heard that you need to make other adjustments to take proper advantage of it. I'm getting "Starter DSL" (to start with), but I don't think that makes a difference. I'm currently running both Red Hat 7.2 and Gentoo 1.1a. How do I set things up? Thanks.
I'm currently using a broadband router (SMC Barricade) which does PPPoE for me, so I don't need anything special on Linux to make it work. However, before getting the router, I was using Red Hat Linux 6.1 with Roaring Penguin's PPPoE software, which was available as an RPM package. (I'm sure a google search would turn it up fairly quickly.)
It was easy to set up and didn't need any kernel patches, which was a real plus for me, because it runs entirely in user-mode. Before installing it, I read some discussions on the sympatico newsgroups about different PPPoE solutions. Some people had a low opinion of user-mode PPPoE implementations because they're less efficient that kernel-mode ones. I decided to try it anyway, because it was easy, and never noticed any problems with slowness on my 200 MHz AMD K6 machine, so I never saw the need to upgrade to a much more complex kernel patch to speed things up. I suspect that unless I had an even slower machine, or wanted to compile big packages while downloading other big packages, I'd never notice the difference.