I refer to my previous post of 15th March regarding the use of a Hauwei E1550 dongle with openSUSE.
I have tried openSUSE 11.3 and 11.4 using Gnome and KDE Desktops, together with Ubuntu 10.10, Fedora 14 and qNewSense distros but to nio avail.
Recently I tried Mandriva 2010.2.
On plugging in the dongle it is immediately recognised together with desktop icons for the dongle and its Micro SD card.
From Applications>Internet>Network Center the window lists the dongle as "GPRS/Edge/3G" and is mounted as "ppp0"
Clicking on the this, there are buttons for "Monitor", "Configure", "Refresh" and "Connect", together with an icon showing signal strength.The programme then asks for a network PIN number (which is not required) and proceeds to configure the network automatically.
One may then "Connect" or "Disconnect" the dongle as required.
Since I assume that Mandriva is based on open source code, why has this "Network Center" not been adopted by openSUSE?
I would welcome fellow users comments on this matter.
‘Out of the box’ support for new models of wireless broadband modem devices is a bit like being on a moving platform. It is a continual process of updating the database (and sometimes driver code) to cater for these, so it is inevitable there will always be some lag involved.
The E1550 model can be coaxed to work with usb_modeswitch (the target vendor=0x12d1 product=0x1001). It contains a configuration file /etc/usb_modeswitch.d/12d1:1446 with these lines
########################################################
# Huawei, newer modems
DefaultVendor= 0x12d1
DefaultProduct=0x1446
TargetVendor= 0x12d1
TargetProductList="1001,1406,140c,141b,14ac"
CheckSuccess=20
MessageContent="55534243123456780000000000000011060000000000000000000000000000"
A udev rule can be used to automate the switching (eg /etc/udev/rules.d/80-huwei.rules)
ACTION=="add" SUBSYSTEM=="usb", SYSFS{idProduct}=="1446", SYSFS{idVendor}=="12d1", RUN+="/usr/sbin/usb_modeswitch"
With 11.2/11.3 at least, there is a file /usr/share/hal/fdi/information/10freedesktop/10-modem.fdi that contains strings for various Huawei (and other) devices. This is used by network manager to handle any device listed there. The (Ox1001) product code lends me to believe your device is supported, provided the modem interface is activated via usb_modeswitch:
<match key="@info.parent:usb.vendor_id" int="0x12d1">
<!-- E600 -->
<match key="@info.parent:usb.product_id" int_outof="0x1001;0x1406">
<match key="@info.parent:usb.interface.number" int="0">
<append key="modem.command_sets" type="strlist">GSM-07.07</append>
<append key="modem.command_sets" type="strlist">GSM-07.05</append>
</match>
</match>