On Fri, Jun 25, 2010 at 05:01:47PM +0100, Paul Tansom wrote:
** Chris G cl@isbd.net [2010-06-25 15:39]:
I've just ordered mobile broadband from Virgin for my wife to use with her laptop (Ubuntu 10.04) when on the move. It comes with an Alcatel X220 USB dongle. Does anyone here use one (same or similar), if so a couple of questions:-
What are the chances of it working 'out of the box'? The Alcatel X220 says it has Linux support. If not then any ideas where to go to find useful information? (I've done some Googling and have some ideas but more is always useful) I'm assuming there's a SIM in the dongle because we want to use it in Belgium as well and I'm hoping all I need to do is buy a mobile broadband SIM there and stick it in the dongle. Am I right? Is there some initialisation/configuring needed to activate the SIM?** end quote [Chris G]
I got one from 3 a while back and finally gave it ago around Easter (iirc), although I've not made major use of it. It was supplied with a standard SIM just the same as a mobile phone, so you have to break it out the plastic holder and fit it in the same way. This one came with software for Linux on the dongle, which initially mounts as a standard USB memory stick. I've not managed to get the software to work properly yet though. That said the dongle works nicely.
What I originally found was that if you run the software and let it fail to connect then Ubuntu (9.10 at the time) will happily make use of the device. As it turns out all this was doing was switching the driver mode from memory stick to modem. Once I'd twigged this it was simply a case of installing the usb-modeswitch package and I was away. The only downside is that, without the supplied software, I can't send or receive SMS messages or use it as a phone (iirc) - although there may be software out there that does that, but I'm not really that worried.
By the looks of this page:
http://www.draisberghof.de/usb_modeswitch/#hardware
the Alcatel X200 and X220L are supported, so you may be in luck.
Excellent, thank you. I'd read about usb-modeswitch during my googling so seeing that it knows about the X220 is good news.