whilst reading a post on another forum, about mobile broadband I re-visited this thread that I have posted above;
you can see that it provides a help for newcomers to configure a mobile broadband USB stick and many distros provide it: eg ubuntu and its derivatives; and fedora for example;
OpenSuse has not adopted this; instead newcomers need to know to google the apn settings of their mobile provider, and then enter them in the settings box;
I have never been clear how to make this suggestion to the developers of OpenSuse, but it would seem to me to be useful to offer this option for those wishing to use mobile broadband
Much work on mobile broadband seems to have been done by Dan Williams and his team at RedHat
I’m using this under 11.2 with backported NWM 0.8.2 (rebuilt from src.rpms) and saw this feature months ago (0.8.0 or 0.8.1), even before release of 11.3, so to me this looks as if you requested a feature already present (and the changelogs indicate “present since nearly one year”).
thanks Axel; it is great that OpenSuse now has rpms of the mobile-broadband information available; thank you very much for pointing that out; as I understand it, this are not core to the 11.3 build; but must be downloaded seperately? I saw that because I installed 11.3 OpenSuse gnome32bit on an ASUS Eee and I needed to enter the apn settings of the providers; (unlike say the ubuntu family that have it built-in): the built-in was what I was suggesting would be valuable to make life easier for newcomers, or those unfamiliar with mobile broadband. I apologise if I have somehow misunderstood this;
I downloaded the latest release of OpenSuse 11.4 (Milestone 4);
it is great to see the mobile broadband assistant is integrated and available: well done to the developers; any new user of mobile broadband will thus have the apn settings of their provider available; they merely select country; network; accept and all that is done;
sadly though, a very common ZTE modem is not recognised as such; it gives an initial ID of
19d2:2000
this ID covers a wide range of slightly differing ZTE devices: eg MF636 etc
other distros: eg Mint10; Ubuntu 10.10 have some means by which this device is automatically “flipped” so that it is not seen as a storage device, and instead as a modem;
I thought it was the new modem manager in the latest network manager; mustn’t be; doesn’t seem that ubuntu has usb_modeswitch built in; can’t be that; nor a udev rule, as udev is no longer implemented? is that right?
whatever …a newbie using ubuntu would plug in, and after 30-60sec could left-click on network manager and be prompted to configure; 11.4 only sees the device as a storage device and does not change its ID: (seen by following lsusb in a terminal);
these comments are comments to perhaps help improve what is already a very fine distro;
