[clug] Mobile broadband for linux?

[Francis James Whittle]

My experience of this a little over a week ago on my partner's Ubuntu
laptop with a 3 prepaid connection and the (older) Huawei E160 modem
was:

- plug stick in
- run through assistant that came up automagically
- Yay, Internet!

Just about no-one will bundle Linux software with their modems.  This is
partially because hardware manufacturers are scared of the Linux, where
such drivers are likely to be necessary, and largely because a vast
majority of GSM modems actually report themselves as USB serial
interfaces and at least the generally useful parts of their command
lists have been standard for decades ("ATZ^RAT S7=45 S0=0 L1 V1 X4 &c1
E1 Q0^R" anyone?).  There are, naturally, exceptions to this.  (Telstra
Turbo 21 for example...)

Although, there has previously been issues with "ZeroCD" modems, that
include drivers on an embedded flash device (thus removing the need for
a driver CD), showing up as a usb-storage device and then not switching
to a modem (unless you had the magic software which eventually a libusb
variant of was created).  If you have an old kernel this might be an
issue, but any recent distribution release should be fine.

As previously mentioned, Network Manager has the majority of Australian
providers preprogrammed into it.

On Mon, 2009-09-14 at 09:28 +1000, RedBox wrote:
> Dear All,
> Does anyone know whether there any problems using mobile broadband usb 
> modems on linux?   I note most have connection manager software for 
> Macs.  i.e. do any have linux applications in the included software or 
> are they all just M$ & Mac?
> Are there any alternate connection managers about to run under linux?
> Cheers,
> Chris Henman