'Til All Are One

I recently bought myself a Hua­wei e169 3G modem as part of a ser­vice with Exetel (based on the Optus net­work). There are a few guides online on how to get it to work with GNU/​Linux, but either they didn’t work as advert­ised or I wasn’t happy with the approach they took. Ubuntu 8.10 is due in three weeks, but since I usu­ally wait at least a month for a new release to settle, I was after a solu­tion that would tide me over for at min­imum the next couple of months. It had to be simple and not too messy.

Here’s the approach I took:

1. Install Net­work­Man­ager 0.7 from the PPA. You might need to reboot after­wards.
   
2. Install usb_​modeswitch. I got lazy and installed a DEB from here. Can someone con­firm that this is included by default in Ubuntu 8.10?
3. Right-​​click the Net­work­Man­ager panel applet and select Edit Con­nec­tions.
4. Select the Mobile Broad­band tab and click Add.
5. Fol­low the wiz­ard/​druid: select your coun­try and upstream pro­vider (I chose Optus 3G).
6. Once the druid is com­plete, return to the Mobile Broad­band tab, select your newly-​​created con­nec­tion, and click Edit.
7. The only set­ting I had to enter was my APN (exetel1). You may also wish to change the Type to Prefer 3G (3 cus­tom­ers can save $$$ by select­ing 3G — thanks Tel­stra! :p ).

Now when you plug in your 3G modem, two things will hap­pen (after a few seconds). Firstly, the ISO9660 filesys­tem on the USB stick will be auto­mat­ic­ally moun­ted and dis­played by Nautilus (you might want to turn this off in the Nautilus pref­er­ences if it gets too annoy­ing). Secondly, you should see an option to use your modem when you click on the Net­work­Manger panel applet. Once con­nec­ted, you can dis­con­nect in the same way.

There we go! Now all I need to do is plug in my modem and connect/​disconnect from the Net­work­Man­ager panel applet. My Eee PC 901 is truly mobile now

LotD: A Sysadmin’s Unix­ersal Trans­lator (ROSETTA STONE)

I haven’t pos­ted any art­icles on PCLinuxOn­line over the past three weeks because I b0rked my Gentoo sys­tem. I upgraded from glibc 2.2.5 to 2.3.1 and since then I haven’t been able to run cer­tain apps without wreck­ing everything else. I’ve detailed my prob­lem here and here. If any­one can help I’d much appre­ci­ate it.

At the moment I can run most apps, but things screw up when I load any part of KDE (includ­ing Kon­queror) or Evol­u­tion. GTK+ (1 and 2) apps (apart from Evol­u­tion) work fine.

Update [2003–03-07]: The prob­lem is with my Nvidia drivers:

Hi! I’m the guy who star­ted this thread. I finally man­aged to fix things by turn­ing off Grse­cur­ity in my ker­nel. How­ever, a very sim­ilar (but dif­fer­ent) prob­lem emerged a few months later. It occurred around the time I upgraded glibc to 2.3.1, so I ini­tially thought glibc was to blame. After lots of exper­i­ment­ing with ker­nel con­figs, I dis­covered that I could have a stable sys­tem using Nvidia drivers if I turned high­mem off, sac­ri­fi­cing just over 100MB of RAM (I have 1GB total).

I then came across cigaraficionado’s bug report and updated nvidia-​​kernel ebuild. I com­piled a new ker­nel, this time turn­ing high­mem back on, and installed the new ebuild. The updated ebuild had no effect — using the Nvidia driver made my sys­tem unstable like before.

My hard­ware seems fine. Memtest86 detects no errors in my RAM (2x Cor­sair XMS 512MB DDR333 SDRAM). My GeForce 3 Ti200 card works per­fectly in Win­dows and it worked per­fectly in Gentoo until Decem­ber, around the time I upgraded to glibc 2.3.1. I can’t fig­ure out where the true prob­lem is, but I strongly sus­pect it lies with nvidia-​​kernel.

That’s what you get for rely­ing on binary-​​only ker­nel mod­ules