Martin Notes

I’ve been spending a lot of time at a client that doesn’t allow foreign laptops on its network. This means that I can’t be online a lot of the time, which is rather problematic since we work with off shore teams and I’d like to be able to contact them. So I thought I’d buy a UMTS usb dongle to be able to be online all the time. I’ve read quite a lot on the support of Ubuntu of broadband mobile connections and I expected to insert the dongle and start working. Sadly that was not the case.

On inserting the dongle nothing happened. After some research it looked like the kernel didn’t recognize the usb for what it was, but it tried to mount it as a drive. This appears to be a known problem since the dongle also contains a drive with drivers for Windows and Mac.

The model number on the dongle is: K3520-Z. The following shows how I got it to work properly.

Find vendor and product ID

First of all you have to find the vendor and product IDs. For this you run:

lsusb

This shows you a list of connected usb devices which looks something like:

Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 001 Device 010: ID 044e:300d Alps Electric Co., Ltd Bluetooth Controller (ALPS/UGPZ6)
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 05ca:183a Ricoh Co., Ltd
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0409:005a NEC Corp. HighSpeed Hub
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 054c:02d5 Sony Corp.
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 002 Device 012: ID 19d2:2000
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub

The Vodafone device is listed without a vendor name, that’s how you can recognize it. In the list above the vendor:product ID is: 19d2:2000.

Kernel parameters

You should add these to your kernel parameters to explain the kernel that it is a serial device. For that you open the menu.lst file.

sudo pico /boot/grub/menu.lst

Find the kernel boot entry and add:

usbserial.vendor=0x19d2 usbserial.product=0x2000

At the end of the kernel you start. The whole line looks something like:

kernel          /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-11-generic root=UUID=3021230a-6c89-43f9-9e69-5d95dde4ff9b ro quiet splash usbserial.vendor=0x19d2 usbserial.product=0x2000

Install drivers

When you’ve done that you should install the vodafone drivers from betavine:

• usb-modeswitch_0.9.7_i386.deb
• vodafone-mobile-connect_svn20090502_all.deb

I’m not sure why these are required, but they seem to install something that picks up the dongle when you insert it.

NOTE: running the Vodafone connect script didn’t work for me.

Configure connection

Finally you go to the Network Connections (System > Preferences > Network Connections) and add the connections in  the Mobile Broadband tab. Don’t forget to enter your pin code!

Restart

Then you should restart to activate the kernel parameters. After the restart I inserted the dongle and repeated:

 dmesg

Until I saw:

[ 1303.650357] option 2-2:1.1: GSM modem (1-port) converter detected
[ 1303.651186] usb 2-2: GSM modem (1-port) converter now attached to ttyUSB0
[ 1303.654780] option 2-2:1.2: GSM modem (1-port) converter detected
[ 1303.654907] usb 2-2: GSM modem (1-port) converter now attached to ttyUSB2
[ 1303.657438] option 2-2:1.3: GSM modem (1-port) converter detected
[ 1303.657549] usb 2-2: GSM modem (1-port) converter now attached to ttyUSB3
[ 1303.659483] option 2-2:1.4: GSM modem (1-port) converter detected
[ 1303.659594] usb 2-2: GSM modem (1-port) converter now attached to ttyUSB4
[ 1303.661613] scsi6 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
[ 1303.663691] usb-storage: device found at 11
[ 1303.663697] usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning

Connect

Then the NetworkManager dropdown (left mouse click on the network icon) shows the Broadband Modem entry. You can click on it to activate the connection. It’s not 100% stable for me, but the connection works good enough once it’s connected.

When I had my wireless and the 3G connection open I ended with a completely frozen machine. I fixed that by disabling my wireless on the hardware level. That is: turn off the switch.

Ubuntu

My wife asked me to migrate her gossip blog from Serendipity to WordPress. Since my coding qualities have nearly died I decided to build the migrator in PHP.

My approach was simple: connect to the Serendipity database, read the entries table, generate a WordPress export XML and import that into WordPress. The WordPress export XML format is really simple, it comes down to RSS deluxe.

The migrator is easy to use:

1. Fill the Serendipity database connection details in the script
2. Upload the script to the serendipity server
3. Request the script in a browser, or using wget
4. Save the result in a file
5. Import the file into wordpress

You can download the script: serrendipity_to_wordpressphptar.

That leaves you with a filled WordPress database. However the images are still missing. Serendipity stores the images in its upload directory. In my case this was in the root of the site: /uploads. Just copy the full directory to the root of the WordPress server solved the problem.

My wife still has to complete the new site, but the migration is a success. Which leaves me with a happy wife and the good feeling of having completed a bit of coding.

Ubuntu

Visit this article for an overview about the new development in commercial operating systems. The article focuses on Windows, but the same applies to Mac OS X. I like the fact that it makes Linux a principle choice, not only a cheap one.

Linux

Right now we’re all happy with our Jaunty Jackalope, but we need to keep looking forward. The release of Karmic Koala (9.10) is scheduled for October this year. It’s planned to have the following features:

• A graphic update
• Full graphical boot
• Fancy graphical login
• New Gnome
• For the server it will support cloud features

An interesting release to look forward to.

Check the release schedule at Ubuntu.

Ubuntu