OPTUS MOBILE BROADBAND OPEN SUSE NEW INSTALL

English Network/Internet
1

Yesterday I just installed new version of OpenSuse on my Acer Aspire Netbook 750h.
Installed the latest OPensuse 12.2.

The home wifi wep connection to Internet works fine.

However, I also have a Mobile Broadband USB with Optus Australia provider which I use to connect tot he Internet when I’m out and about.
I just switched from Ubuntu, in Ubuntu, when I setup my network connection via Network Manager, it worked straight away.

However, in Open Suse, I did the same thing, setup the APN and the PPP, etc. and OpenSuse doesn’t seems to recognise the USB stick… and connection state is always not connected.

Please help… I don’t know what to do…

Please advise.

Cheers
David

2

Can you provide more details about the USB broadband modem?

lsusb

Some of these devices need the support of ‘usb_modeswitch’ to activate the modem interface first, otherwise they present themselves only as a storage device (by design). Once you know the chipset, or model no, it should be fairly easy to get working. Many of the devices when activated, communicate via a USB serial interface (/dev/ttyUSB*), while some of the newer devices appear as an ethernet device (via cdc_ether, usbnet drivers).

3

The details of my Optus USB stick is

inux-ng56:~ # lsusb
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 0c45:62c0 Microdia Sonix USB 2.0 Camera
Bus 004 Device 002: ID 0a5c:2101 Broadcom Corp. Bluetooth Controller
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 12d1:1436 Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.
linux-ng56:~ # ^C

Hope this helps.

Please let me know where do I go from here.

Cheers
David

4 
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 12d1:1436 Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.

The usb_modeswitch package appears to provide switching support for Huawei devices (like yours). I had a brief look at the /lib/udev/rules.d/40-usb_modeswitch.rules file:


# Huawei, newer modems
ATTRS{idVendor}=="12d1", ATTRS{idProduct}=="1446", RUN+="usb_modeswitch '%b/%k'"

There is an associated config file /usr/share/usb_modeswitch/12d1:1446

# Huawei, newer modems

TargetVendor=  0x12d1
TargetProductList="1001,1406,140b,140c,1412,141b,1433,1436,14ac,1506"

MessageContent="55534243123456780000000000000011062000000100000000000000000000"

The rule triggers the switching action, exposing the modem interface, hence your reported chipset. So, next thing to check is do you have /dev/ttyUSB* present?

ls -l /dev/ttyUSB*

If this all checks out, there may be some other issue that needs to be checked out: PIN, SIM activated?