Most broadband dongles can be made to work on linux, they are treated as a old style modem and you have to setup a dialup connection for them.
But your biggest problem will probably be due to the flavour of linux those little aspire ones come with, it's a very cut down version of linux and doesn't come with the modules to manage a dialup connections.
this tells you roughly how to do it, although this page is about a nokia phone the principle is the same as they are both USB modems.