Pablo Endres’s Blog

After a lot of fighting I finally got my UMTS card working with Fedora 9.

I have a T-Mobile Web’n'Walk II card which turns out to be a Option GEO201 by Qualcomm.  The main problem with this card is that someone had the wonderful idea of integrating a usb flash drive (so you don’t ever loose the drivers) with a usb gsm modem.

The main trick is to use a small program called usb_modeswitch which disables the flash drive and loads the modem’s driver.  So lets cut the chat and get it done:

1. Go to http://www.draisberghof.de/usb_modeswitch/ and download the latest version of the file.
2. Make sure you have  libusb + libusb-devel + lsusb installed$ sudo yum install libusb libusb-devel usbutils
3. Unpack, build and install the usb_modeswitch.
   

   $ mkdir ~/tmp
   $ cd ~/tmp
   $ tar jxvf ~/Download/usb_modeswitch-0.9.4.tar.bz2  # or a newer version
   $ cd ~/tmp/usb_modeswitch-0.9.4
   $ ./compile.sh
   $ sudo install -m755 -o root usb_modeswitch /usr/sbin
   $ sudo install -m744 -o root usb_modeswitch.conf /etc/

4. Now lets setup udev so it automagically runs usb_modeswitch when the card is inserted.  This gives us the plug ‘n play behaviour.  This we will do as root.
   

   $ /bin/su -
   # vi /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules
   ####  => Insert the following text:

   #Globetrotter HSDPA Modem T-Mobile Web’n'Walk Express II
   #Bus 002 Device 003: ID 0af0:6701 Option
   #idVendor=05c6, idProduct=1000 are the infos of the flash drive
   #idVendor=0af0, idProduct=6701 are the infos of the HSDPA Modem

   SUBSYSTEM==”usb”, ATTR{idProduct}==”1000″, ATTR{idVendor}==”05c6″, RUN+=”/usr/sbin/usb_modeswitch”

5. Make sure that the ” are correct, and that the copy paste doesn’t screw them up (got reports that it does)
6. Setup the card using the network manager.  Here is my setup for T-Mobile in Germany

Note: The values I used for the udev script I got from running: # lsusb -v

Well hope that sets you up to go.  This should work with other Linux distributions as well

Thanks Per Lasse for the comments and corrections

Updates:
11.12.2007: I upgraded my laptop to Fedora 10 and it works flawless
Tested it in Ubuntu 8.04 LTS and 8.10

Hi after a long silence I finally got the time to catch up with the blogging.  So the best thing to do of course is update my software..

Well after upgrading from b2evolution 2.0.x to 2.4.x my hosting server started complaining about memory!!  I decided to try WordPress out just before moving to a better environment and it worked out great!  Well is was a pain moving all my post manually:  on the WordPress site there is a script that was supposed to take care of that, but it’s last upgrade is 1.9.

Well I’m back and writting again.