I’ve been loaned a USB mobile broadband modem by 3 to try out for a few months. I’ll write a proper post about why I’ve got it and what I think of it later. First, I wanted to share how I got it working with my EEE PC.
What am I talking about?
The modem is a small USB dongle – not dissimilar in appearance from a USB memory stick. You put a SIM card in, and the small mobile phone radio inside gives an Internet connection to any computer that it’s plugged into.
The dongle is a Huawei E169G.
So what’s the problem?
The dongle is supported on Windows and Mac OS. Not Linux. My EEE PC still runs the original Xandros Linux.
Should it work on Linux?
Posts on the eeeuser forum suggested that it wouldn’t be possible.
Other dongles seem to have caused less trouble, but the E169 wouldn’t work.
The consensus seemed to be that:
Huawei 169 requires a patch to usb-storage driver to recognize the hardware similarly to 220… I think that ASUS is on a way to produce a small upgrade package to fix the issue for E169.
And a little Googling failed to turn up anyone who has got the Huawei E169 to work with an EEE PC on Linux.
Still… how hard could it really be, eh? 🙂
