Hi All,

Does anybody know of any issues regarding Vodafone 3G Broadband and Linux? On the Vodafone website they say that you need Windows XP/Vista to use their Broadband modem. More than likely my laptop will have a dualboot (Vista and Linux).

Thanks,
Miriam

Do you know what type of modem the Vodafone 3G card uses? I have a 3g USB modem (huawei e220) from Three UK and it works perfectly fine in openSUSE.

so far I'd try 2 kind of model, it work. Which model u use?

Hi Reddazz,

I'm seriously thinking of getting one of these things but I really want to be able to use it on linux.

I have done alot of searching for instructions to get these to work on linux but I haven't been able to find anything useful. Please can you tell me how you managed to do this? And are you using the USB or the PCMCIA one? I think you can only get USB ones.

I used to use openSUSE but now I'm on fedora. I can't see things being emormously different though.

Thanks for your help.

Tim.

PS: The ones I was looking at are these ones: http://threestore.three.co.uk/broadband/

timnp, the modem I have is the usb type modem. If you plug it into a Linux system and run dmesg, its recognised as Huawei E220 USB modem. Mine is attached to /dev/ttyUSB0, so you can just configure it like a normal modem. I managed to get it working by configuring it in YAST and then using kinternet to dial out. An alternative that works is to use kppp to configure the modem and dial out. If it works on openSUSE 10.3, it should work on Fedora and if you experience any problems, just start a thread here (and email me with the link to the thread), so that we can fix any issues.

Thanks

Think I'm going to order one of these tomorrow.

Yes definitely going to get one now as I have 14 days right of return if it is unused and they'll still accept it back if it is used but not for more than three consecutive days, can't go wrong can it...

Yes, thats why I bought mine as well. I thought, I will just try it and if it does not work just return it. Anyway, I managed to get it up and running in just a few minutes which was great.

This is good info to know. I actually wanted to get one of these as well, but the brochure didn't mention it working with Linux, so I went for another that said it specifically works with Linux (also make by huawei).

Right.

So I plugged it into my fedora laptop and it creates two new devices. /dev/ttyUSB0 and /dev/ttyUSB1 . It also pops up asking me when I want to do with the new CD drive I just plugged in. (For those that don't know, these devices also imitate a CD drive with all the files/drivers so that windows users can use the device with little hassle. I unmounted this CD drive).

Next I edited /etc/wvdial.conf so that it reads like this...

(I will experiment with various bauds once its all working)

Then, as root user, I run

"wvdial hsdpa"

and it connects. At least, I think it connects.

The wvdial command never actually terminates, it gives lots of output generally indicating that things are good and what the various dns, gateway and local IPs are but then stops. I'm probably meant to run it as a deamon.

When I do "ifconfig", a new ppp0 device is listed (again, at least I think its new, I don't ever remember seeing it before).

My problem now is that I don't know how to actually get my traffic routed over the ppp0 device, it tries to be using my wlan0 even if I use the switch on the side of my laptop to turn it off. So how do I get the traffic to be routed over ppp0?

Am I right using wvdial to do this or is there a better way? I will still need to get the traffic routed properly.

The network device manager on my laptop is an interesting thing as it lists eth0, ppp0 and ppp1. When I try to activate or deactivate any of these it always fails and wlan0 isn't listed in there at all! For this reason, I would like to try and do things from the command line if at all possible.

Thanks for your help,

Tim.

I personally got rid of network manager because it gave me nothing but grief. For dialing out using my 3 USB modem, I am currently using KPPP and have not problems.

Thanks, I will try that. Will the traffic be routed properly? I read I might need to check the routes with:

route -n

and then maybe modify them with something like

sudo route add default gw 10.64.64.64

I'm at work at the moment so will try these things when I get home tonight.

I didn't have to tamper with the routing. I just configured kppp with the dialup number (which is *99#), the authentication type (chap) and details of the modem (/dev/ttyUSB0) and I was good to go. Everything else was left as default.

Thanks.

KPPP worked a charm. Posting this message from the three network now

It's a little slower than I was hoping for though to be fair I havent tried altering the baud rate yet. But hey, it works so i'm happy.

Thanks for all your help!

I'm glad you got it working. I found using kppp to setup the modem to be pretty painless compared to some of the methods that were being suggested on some sites I had visited prior to purchasing the modem.