Alex Jurkiewicz's technical blog

Vodafone Mobile Broadband on Ubuntu - part 2

I installed Ubuntu 8.04 x64 onto my new laptop, and discovered a far nicer way to hop on the net with my Huawei E220: Vodafone Mobile Connect Card driver. Unlike last time I tried it, the latest build (2.0.beta3) worked more or less out of the box.

The app does a lot more than just wvdial, you can In Theory send/receive SMSes, as well as follow your quota usage. I say 'In Theory', because the former doesn't seem to work for me, and the latter is just painfully slow to draw and update when dragged around the screen. Other problems:

• Moving the USB Device between ports while the laptop is on (yay USB hotswap!) fails 100% of the time for me,
• Using the device when it wasn't plugged in at boot time is sketchy,
• Tends to think you're plugging in a new device every time you use it.
• Randomly borks far more than wvdial ever did (which was never), not too much if you don't poke it while it's working though.

None of those problems really matter for me, and since it can minimise to the tray I've happily migrated across. Far more newbie friendly too.

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