t e c h i e - t a l k s ::: technology at its best

With the recent release of Ubuntu 9.10 - Karmic Koala, there have been posts on problems getting the Huawei USB dongles to work. After doing a simple search, it seems that this problem lies with a bug in the kernel and bug fixes are on the way. For the meantime, here are two ways to get the Huawei USB dongles to work.

The first way is the easiest: Let the kernel recognise the USB device on system start-up. This is done by attaching the USB dongle before the boot-up of the OS. The network manager should be able to detect the USB device thereafter.

The second work around, as taken from here involves removing the conflicting device drivers that comes with the dongle - the USB storage drivers. Firstly, you have to remove the USB storage device drivers,

** If rmmod vomits you this error message,

ERROR: Module usb_storage is in use

unmount the storage device from your desktop first before running the rmmod program. That should circumvent the error messages.

Next, do a modprobe of the usb device:

The vendor ID and product ID can be found by typing lsusb into command shell which gives you a list of USB device IDs in a format of xxxx:yyyy (where xxxx is your vendor ID and yyyy is your product id). The USB device should be available at the network manager now. However, there are some reports that the second method may only work for some USB modem only.

As of the time of writing, a release has been committed but not yet released. Let’s hope that it’ll come out soon enough. Cheers!

P.S. I am using Huawei E169 USB modem. I have tried the first method and it seems that it consistently works (several times now). The second method works for E220.