hen I was in a UK Vodafone shop querying about their mobile broadband and said I would use it for Linux, the shop assistant said that it might work but it would in that case require some effort. Vodafone officially support Windows and Mac OS but I knew that the Huawei E169 works with Linux so I couldn’t think of a reason why the Huawei E170 or Huawei E172 from Vodafone wouldn’t.
I got myself the package and the thing is, it works brilliantly and is really easy to set up!
The complete guide I followed is here and the steps are:
- Add Betavine to the Synaptic Package Management system
- Install the Vodafone Mobile Connect card driver
- Plug in the dongle
- Start the driver from the menu
- Configure a driver profile by adding username=web, password=web and APN host=Internet
I did get an error message after installing the driver but it’s likely that was because I hadn’t plugged in the dongle yet. The error was:
E: vodafone-mobile-connect: subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1
I tried accessing the internet before closing the dialog with the error message and it worked fine. When I closed the dialog there was another one behind it that I hadn’t noticed with the title “Changes applied” which said “Not all changes and updates succeeded…” … “Sorry, no modem was detected…”. So, maybe you won’t get that error if you plug in the dongle before installing the driver. If someone tries that, please let me know if I should change the order in the list above. For now I keep it as is since it worked for me.
— UPDATE —
Yesterday after having used this for little more than two days I started having problems. The problem exactly was that when I started the Vodafone Mobile Connect software, the splash screen showed on screen and then nothing. That is, I didn’t get to the point where you choose device and can connect.
I did get to that point if I didn’t have the stick plugged in. But since the stick has to be plugged before starting the driver that didn’t help much. (If you start the driver unplugged and then plug in the stick, the driver doesn’t discover the stick so you have to restart the driver.)
I reinstalled the drivers, still the same. Then I tried from command line, voila! Simple as that and good enough for me.
This is the command to start the driver from a shell:
>vodafone-mobile-connect-card-driver-for-linux
Quite long hey? Good thing then that most shells have auto-complete, just start typing the first few letters and hit the tab key.
I have no idea what had happened and I’m not going to spend time trying to figure it out, it’s not worth it. If it works from command line I am happy with that.
(The version of the driver I’m using is 1.99.17)
alessio