Pay As You Go Dongle?
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Mithrildor
I Haz Custom Title
if its USB 2.0 high-speed: Yes if not : no
craigix
Mega GP Mania
Restless said:
I think they just use a modem protocol, so yeah it will work as if by magic.
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I suppose you have the dongle already, so download a linux livecd. I recommend Fedora as they wholeheartedly refuse to include binary blobs of any kind, and thus you won't get a false positive. Put it in, boot from it, plug in your dongle and try going online. If it works out of the box so be it, otherwise there's a small guide to get the whole thing working with a udev hack here
hobbyman II
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they work by magic, just plug and play, no need for "custom" interfaces or weird icons in the task bar, just works.
edit: I keep posting this every few months, you should have been able to find it in search, it just shows up as a network device in the network manager, select your isp and connect, easy .
can confirm Huawei e220 and e156g modems "just work" personally, the e220 is my main internet connection (no phone line out here in the sticks), e156g is used on my netbooks, all run Linux, Huawei drivers for those modems are included in the kernel, so all Linux versions will support em.
edit: I keep posting this every few months, you should have been able to find it in search, it just shows up as a network device in the network manager, select your isp and connect, easy .
can confirm Huawei e220 and e156g modems "just work" personally, the e220 is my main internet connection (no phone line out here in the sticks), e156g is used on my netbooks, all run Linux, Huawei drivers for those modems are included in the kernel, so all Linux versions will support em.
WizardStan
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While most sticks should "just work" without any additional drivers, there are two important caveats that took me a long time to discover when I set up my parents high speed stick in Ubuntu.
1) Many of the sticks, when first plugged in, operate in CD mode, where they report to the computer that they are actually a CD ROM that contains a disk which has the connection software on it. They cannot be in both CD and modem mode at the same time, so when you first plug it in, you need to send an eject to the the disk. This signals the stick to switch from CD mode to modem mode. Fortunately, linux has a command line program "eject" that does just that. Simply call "eject /dev/sr1" (or whichever device the drive has been loaded to) and it switches. The Windows software the you install does this automatically. Some sticks also have a setting which can be toggled to tell it not to start in CD mode, but not all of them. Older sticks, with drivers coming on traditional disks rather than in flash on the stick will not have this problem.
2) You need to know the access point for the init string. Without this init string, the modem doesn't know how to authenticate against your wireless's server (or something like that). The init line looks something like
where bell.internet.ca is something unique to your carrier. If you have a cell phone with your carrier, you may be able to find it somewhere on your phone as "GPRS access point" or something like that. If you can't find it, you can call up your carrier and they may be able to help you out. Just ask what the GPRS access point is supposed to be. If they don't know, tell them you're running Linux and would like to be promoted to second tier support.
1) Many of the sticks, when first plugged in, operate in CD mode, where they report to the computer that they are actually a CD ROM that contains a disk which has the connection software on it. They cannot be in both CD and modem mode at the same time, so when you first plug it in, you need to send an eject to the the disk. This signals the stick to switch from CD mode to modem mode. Fortunately, linux has a command line program "eject" that does just that. Simply call "eject /dev/sr1" (or whichever device the drive has been loaded to) and it switches. The Windows software the you install does this automatically. Some sticks also have a setting which can be toggled to tell it not to start in CD mode, but not all of them. Older sticks, with drivers coming on traditional disks rather than in flash on the stick will not have this problem.
2) You need to know the access point for the init string. Without this init string, the modem doesn't know how to authenticate against your wireless's server (or something like that). The init line looks something like
Code:
AT+cgdcont=1,"IP","bell.internet.ca"It will probably register itself as a PPP modem, so NetworkManager will automagically let you configure it with a nice little wizard. The real issue is whether a driver exists for your particular USB modem. If it's Huawei then it'll just work. You might need to add a simple udev line from what my google searches revealed, but it'll "just work" after that, if you even need to do it.Restless said:
The post configuration (ie. connecting to your provider etc.) can all be done with NetworkManagers GUI, which is installed in the official image.
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VRAndy
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zhasha said:
Out of curiosity, and I'm sorry to side-track, which distros do include binary blobs? Surely Debian won't, And Gentoo and Slack are all about the source code..... Besides comedy options like Linspire, what does that leave? Does Ubuntu include closed source software in their main distribution?
.... Or am I completely wrong and/or out of touch about those distros I mentioned not having opaque blobs in their distribution?
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Prometheus
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I was of the impression that Ubuntu made that stuff optional by default, though. :blink:
Optional yes, but last I used ubuntu (which admittedly was a long time ago), it installed some binary drivers by default, and others (fglrx, nvidia, etc) would have to be explicitly installed. In any case, Fedora has an OMG FREE policy that extends to everything but firmware, so if you want to know if there's a free driver for your device, it's at least a good starting point.Prometheus said:
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gruso
thunderbox
Terrible answer. Please refer to the USB link in my sig.Mithrildor said:
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viridior
Member
VRAndy said:
Gentoo being focused on compiling from source code I can understand but that isn't necessarily correct (you can link to a binary repo if you want to), but that doesn't mean that you can't or won't use binary blobs when wanted or needed.
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dflemstr
It's a ball.
The Linux kernel itself contains binary blobs for closed-source firmwares. Case closed.viridior said:
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