Corel's distro is based on Debian, which uses the .deb and apt-get packaging system. As Betamax said, you should have pretty much everything you'd need to get started, though after getting comfortable you may want to download updated versions of your software (especially Gnome and/or KDE, if you use them), since most newer versions have speed and stability improvements.
As for Free ISP support, I can't really say. However, don't most of them use a special client to dialin? That is, you have to use thier software under Windows? If so, then I'd say you're out of luck unless they also ofter Linux dialup software (which isn't likely). You could, of course, use Windows to download any software you'd like to compile/install then copy it over within Linux. Just a thought.