swbell DSL

[phase at booyaka.com]

does anybody have experience with southwestern bell DSL?
a friend of mine ordered it recently after i told him he
could run linux on his old, unused 486 and use it as a
firewall/masquerading box to share the connection among
a couple of win98 machines.  i recently put a couple of
ISA ne2000 clones in the box, installed slackware 7 on
it, and set it up to use dhcpcd to configure the outside
interface.  now, before swbell will install the service,
they're requiring proof that my friend owns a registered
copy of win98.  this has me worried that their service
uses PPPOE or in some other way *requires* win98.  can
anyone confirm or deny my concern?  if they do use DHCP,
do they supply a PCI ethernet card and check the hardware
address of the card before allowing a lease?  i ask this
last question because the old machine has no PCI slots...

thanks,
matt lee