harishpillay

Mobile Broadband on my F9 + SingTel’s e169 usb dongle

I am really pleased to note that Fedora 9 (esp the LiveCD) works off the bat with the Huawei E169 USB broaband device. I have just subscribed to the mobile broadband with SingTel for about S$15 a month for 50GB traffic “1000” plan. I just plugged the USB dongle into the machine (both a laptop and a desktop), and NetworkManager showed up an entry “GSM Network” “Auto GSM network connection”. Clicking on it, a few swirls later, viola, am on the network. Nothing to be done and all things just work. Excellent work developers!

A note about the Huawei E169 USB dongle: it has a micro SD slot and came with a 1GB memory card. I think it will be cool to be able to load a F9 live USB image into that 1GB card and use whole deal on any machine! Sweet!

9 comments


  1. I was very pleased to read that NetworkManager appears to support the Huawei E169 out of the box. Is the device’s memory also detected and auto mounted like a USB stick as well? Can you get traffic data from the device? Like you can on Windows? Thanks.
    I don’t have windows, so I cannot say what else is detected, but for sure, there are two mount points that appear – one a readonly CDish partition containing the code for installing that dongle on a windows machine and the other the flash disk.
    Because the account I have only does data, I am not sure if there are other functionalities like SMS etc that can be made with the device.

    Reply

    • Jon –
      There’s an open source project (sponsored by Vodafone?) that may be able to supply you with the drivers and a beautiful GUI to track data usage.
      Unfortunately, I’ve had no luck with it on Ubuntu 8.04. Other folks seem to be very happy with it. Here’s the link –
      https://forge.betavine.net/projects/vodafonemobilec
      Hope that helps.

      Reply

      • The vodaphone stuff works as well, and I would like to see if part of the standard Fedora repo. I have contacted the authors as listed in the credits section and hopefully they will agree.


      • This will check the repository, see if it needs cleaning, and perform the necessary operations. Its a safe command, you can even start it, and keep on working on the same repository.


      • If this happens, first check the repository and see if you can solve it by setting the appropriate permissions on the corresponding RCS files.


  2. modem hangup
    Aug 5 18:38:02 matanui kernel: PPP generic driver version 2.4.2
    Aug 5 18:38:02 matanui pppd[3472]: pppd 2.4.4 started by root, uid 0
    Aug 5 18:38:02 matanui pppd[3472]: Using interface ppp0
    Aug 5 18:38:02 matanui pppd[3472]: Connect: ppp0 /dev/ttyUSB0
    Aug 5 18:38:02 matanui NetworkManager: impl_ppp_manager_need_secrets(): Cleared secrets, but setting didn’t need any secrets.
    Aug 5 18:38:02 matanui pppd[3472]: Unable to obtain CHAP password for matanui.datalogica.com on UMTS_CHAP_SRVR from plugin
    Aug 5 18:38:02 matanui pppd[3472]: No CHAP secret found for authenticating us to UMTS_CHAP_SRVR
    Aug 5 18:38:05 matanui NetworkManager: impl_ppp_manager_need_secrets(): Cleared secrets, but setting didn’t need any secrets.
    Aug 5 18:38:05 matanui pppd[3472]: Unable to obtain CHAP password for matanui.datalogica.com on UMTS_CHAP_SRVR from plugin
    Aug 5 18:38:05 matanui pppd[3472]: No CHAP secret found for authenticating us to UMTS_CHAP_SRVR
    Aug 5 18:38:05 matanui pppd[3472]: CHAP authentication succeeded
    Aug 5 18:38:05 matanui pppd[3472]: CHAP authentication succeeded
    Aug 5 18:38:05 matanui NetworkManager: (ttyUSB0): device state change: 5 -> 7
    Aug 5 18:38:05 matanui kernel: PPP Deflate Compression module registered
    Aug 5 18:38:23 matanui pppd[3472]: Modem hangup
    mine is a fedora9 coming from a fedora8 upgrade, and this caused many issues (see fedora-ml)
    i would try to connect using a live-cd
    sorry for stupid question: which image do u have, if there are many of them?
    i suppose there is only one, that relaesed when fedora9 was (13-5-2008)
    tia
    maurizio

    Reply

    • Re: is this your’s one?
      Yes. I wanted to ensure that the generally available Fedora 9 live CD was able to work with the e169 off the bat – which it does. So, I would suggest that you do the same as well. I am sure that there are ways to make the F8->F9 updated system work as well, but my objective was to show that it worked without any additional work in Fedora 9.

      Reply

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