Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Acer Aspire One, Huawei E169G and Three IR

One of my co-workers has asked me to post this up. It's rough and ready, so make of it what you want.

First off, Acer recently pushed an update for better performance with the Huawei USB modems... I'm assuming that you have this update... check if the file /etc/udev/rules.d/10-Huawei-Datacard.rules
exists.

If that file exists then when you plug in a E169g it will be correctly autodetected without requiring poking about with usbmodeswitch... it will bind the three serial ports of the E169G to /dev/HuaweiMobile-0, /dev/HuaweiMobile-1 and /dev/HuaweiMobile-2.

OK, so assuming you see these device nodes after plugging in the E169G, the next problem is getting wvdial to connect. Here's the wvdial.conf file I use


[Dialer Defaults]
Init2 = ATZ
Init3 = ATH
Init4 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Stupid Mode = 1
Modem Type = USB Modem
ISDN = 0
Phone = *99\#
Modem = /dev/HuaweiMobile-0
Username = username
Password = password
Dial Command = ATDT
Baud = 460800
Init5 = AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","3ireland.ie"


By the way, the username is actually "username", and the password is actually "password".

That should be enough to get any self-respecting linux freak 90% of the way there. There was some stuff I had to tweak to get DHCP to populate resolve.conf from the pppd connection... and I added the following udev rule as 70-huawei-e169g-dial.rules

SUBSYSTEM=="usb" SYSFS{idProduct}=="1001",SYSFS{idVendor}=="12d1",RUN+="/usr/sbin/e169g_dial"


And, /usr/sbin/e169g_dial is just


#!/bin/sh
sleep 5
/usr/bin/wvdial 2>&1 > /var/log/wvdial &


You might be able to tune down from 5 seconds if you can be bothered... but you need at least some delay

3 comments:

  1. Hi,

    Having just got an Acer Aspire One 110 yesterday and having a E169G dongle from 3 ireland and living on a boat I'm keen to get it going and hoped your post would send me in the right direction.

    I've followed the instructions as closely as I could and the results are encouraging but I'm not there yet.

    My machine didn't have the 10-Huawei-Datacard.rules file but I found one on one of the downloads from the Acer site - hope it's the right one. I copied all the mods you indicated to the files concerned and when I plug in the dongle get a "device found" message and also a "Mobile Partner" window popping up, though it didn't have any profiles available.

    I looked at /etc/resolv.conf and there was nothing there and I don't know what you (or your colleague) would do there anyway.

    Any idea what I need to check next?

    Chris

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  2. Btw I should say that the lsusb command gives as output:

    Bus 003 Device 015 ID 12d1: 1001 Huawei E620 3G Modem

    So it's evidently seeing the right device - the modem says E169G on the label so I don't know why this says different.

    It looks like I'm just in need of a profile to connect, but at the moment I'm not getting the connection.

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  3. Glad to say it's all working! I'm not sure what was contributed by the code on this page and how much by the download from the Acer site. But Im posting this comment using the Aspire One. So good job done!

    Chris

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