mobile broadband on linux

[karenb1888]

hey everyone.... i bought my partner the acer aspire running on linux for xmas - we have since discovered that we cant seem to get mobile broadband on the linux system! we were told this by vodafone whom we got the mobile broadband from------

Can anyone point me in the right direction with this or have i just wasted my money on this????

thanx in advance

Karen

[bigtomrodney]

Hi Karen. That's just the usual party line from any big company. They tell you it doesn't work as they don't want to pay/train to support it. It actually works perfectly, the Huawei modems are supported by drivers in the kernel. I run Network Manager 0.7 and have run it with 3 network but all of the phone networks (well 3, O2 and Vodafone) are using the same hardware and configuration. It's simple to setup with Network Manager but I haven't used Linpus Linux on the Acer Aspire (or ever) so I can't tell you how to configure it unfortunately). I believe there should be an option to configure modems available to you? If you select one of the Huawei modems it should work fine.

Can you see any option for configuring modems?

[karenb1888]

thanx for the advice - i personally know nothing about computers but know a man that does so he will understand this a bit better - can you tell me how we could go about doing this - do we uy the modem and then buy a sim card from a provider or is there a mobile broadbandprovider that uses these modems??

Karen

[bigtomrodney]

If you got it from Vodafone you can use their service. There is very little configuration involved or at least using Network Manager. Basically you give it your PIN number from what I saw. Let me know how you get on, I don't have that PC to hand (it was a friends) but I might be able to dig out more if you need it.