Ubuntu Karmic Koala (9.10) and Meteor Broadband To Go
My first experience with Linux was a Slackware 2.x distro that I must have re-installed/re-compiled a hundred times via 20+ 1.44Mb floppy disks. Back then, and since then to be honest, I have always had problems getting the kernel to detect and load drivers for peripherals but for a computer geek that’s half the fun of using linux. (The other problem I had back then was bad floppy disks – there was nothing more depressing than hitting 19/20 disks and getting a read error!).
I’m now running Ubuntu Karmic Koala on a little Acer netbook and so far everything I’ve thrown at it has Just Worked.
My latest test was plugging a Huawei E180 3G modem into the netbook. I almost did it just for kicks as I had no idea that it’d show up as anything other than a mass storage device.
Silly me, Ubuntu allowed me to run a ‘Create A Mobile Broadband’ connection wizard and 10 minutes later I was online.
Why 10 minutes? It appeared to connect just fine but it wasn’t resolving any hostnames. For some reason the DNS server settings were not automatically set correctly when the connection was dialled up. Anyway, manually setting the DNS server to 212.129.64.220 (via Network Connection ->IPv4 Settings) fixed it.
The only other thing I had to do (which the wizard didn’t prompt for) was enter my PIN in the Network Connection -> Mobile Broadband -> Advanced settings section.
So, Kudos again to the linux community, setting up a mobile broadband connection, even without a vendor supplied installer, is now as easy as doing so in Windows or OS X!
Oh man, that brings back some memories. Hours spent feeding floppies into my old 386 until the “clunk-clunk” noise of a read failure meant I’d finally give up and go to bed.