Vodafone mobile and Ubuntu
A while a go, I’ve tried a Vodafone’s Mobile connect pciexpress card on my laptop running Ubuntu, it worked perfectly! I’ve installed the Betavine’s vodafone linux driver and managed to get online without a sweat. While in testing I managed to physically hurt my pciexpress slot since it’s very poorly placed. So I’ve decided for usb variant insted, again I tested it, worked like a charm. After ordering it from our vendor, and a bit longer waiting than usual, I finally got it, but a slightly different model, Huawei K3520.
So I sad, hey let’s plug it in and try to connect. At first attempt it returned some error about not enough serial interfaces… ofc. I ignored it, looked at dmesg, usb modem correctly initialized, so I figured “must be bug in software”. I reinserted the stick, and tried again, this time with success.
Next time I’ve inserted the stick same error returned. And it wasn’t solvable with reinserting this time.
After some additional searching, it seams to be a problem in USB sticks that uses combined gsm modem and MicroSD drive. Initially when you plug in USB modem it configures itself as mass storage device, and thus disabling vmc2 for operating it as it should.
There is a very simple solution for debian based systems. All you need to do is download this deb package:
I’ve made a mirror on: http://toic.org/debs/e169g-switch_0.2_all.deb
Original package can be found on:http://www.greenhughes.com/files/e169g-switch_0.2_all.deb
After downloading it, install it with:
Package monitors usb ports and switch your usb stick from mass storage to gsm modem mode. So after installing this package, you should be able to use your vmc2 software without any problems.
If you don’t use debian alike os, you can try and install the usb_modeswitch from : http://www.draisberghof.de/usb_modeswitch/
Related posts:
Old post was inaccurate, and after some more searching and googling I’ve found a better and easier solution. If you have made some modifications to your vmc2 program as mentioned in first version of this post, please reinstall the vmc2 software and follow the instructions in this post. Also that bash script is now obsolete and it’s not necessary to run vmc2 if you use this method.