Saturday, 07 Mar 2009

3 mobile broadband on Linux

I had to get a mobile broadband gizmo this week. It’s something I’ve been avoiding (not having internet access while sitting at a cafe by the beach is a feature, not a bug), but I need it for a current client. After advice from one of my colleagues that “3” (one of the carriers here and the first that did 3G digital phones in Australia) was reliable and, more importantly, that their device worked with Linux, I went and picked one up along with a prepay SIM.

3’s offering has two devices at the same price right now; the Huawei E160G and the ZTE MF627. I thought my friend had the latter and so bought that one. Big mistake.

E160G Bit older works great	MF627 Brand new doesn’t work

Do not get the ZTE MF627 device if running Linux. Stay away from it. Even after trying the usb_modeswitch hassles, it still does not present as the device as a GSM modem like it is supposed to. Tried it on two separate laptops; one running Gentoo, the other with Ubuntu’s “J” version on it. Spent the better part of a day researching and debugging the issue, but no joy on either. One person in London claims to have a similar device working, but comparing their lsusb and dmesg output, I’m not convinced the electronics in the one available here were the same; after doing a mode switch the miniSD adapter presents, but not the modem. Anyway, sure, maybe someday someone will figure out how to make it work here, but that’s not right now.

Even worse, people writing in places like Whirlpool cite chronic quality problems with ZTE devices. Clearly this is something to avoid.

I took the thing back to the store the next day and finally managed to get a refund which I promptly used to buy their other device (why they couldn’t just do an exchange was as puzzling to the poor guy in the store as it was to me. Whatever; they kept him on the phone for almost an hour while the corporate drones he had to call for permission made up their minds that it was ok to give me my money back).

So home I went with a Huawei E160G (which is what Peter had) and it worked perfectly, right out of the box, literally. Plugged it in, device properly recognized by USB subsystem and, after adding a “mobile broadband” connection with NetworkManager 0.7, it immediately started working. Pretty amazing.

You need to have the PPP stack built into your kernel and pppd installed (once upon a time we all had that, but most of us haven’t needed to do point-to-point over a dialup modem for years, so if you’re running a modern system with a custom Linux kernel you might not have it). The relevant kernel modules are “ppp_async“, “usbserial“, and “option“.

So a big hooray to the NetworkManager team and all the people working on the drivers that made this magic work. That NetworkManager seamlessly handles all the PPP configuration and dialing is brilliant.

Neat connection active icon.

And as for the lovely staff in the store, don’t let them tell you that their service doesn’t work on Linux — but do get a device that does.

AfC

e160g-and-networkmanager, posted by Andrew Cowie in software/gnome-desktop at 2009-03-07T06:03:17Z

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