Well, as I’m off to The Hague for the rest of the year, I need some kind of Internet in the evening. So off to KPN to get a umts card (or dongel as they call it). For late night gaming I’ve also bought a PSP :-)

Well, to make a long story short: this stuff is hard to get working in Ubuntu. When you insert the dongle it is first seen as a cdrom…, only after you successfully install the Windows software it will become a modem. Who comes up with this kind of crap?

Get it working⌗

First of all I needed the info in this bugreport.

I’ve also had to edit /usr/share/hal/fdi/preprobe/10osvendor/20-broken-usb-sticks according to this comment

In /etc/rc.local I had to include:

modprobe usbserial vendor=0x19d2 product=0x0015

So that the usbserial driver gets loaded. The product id is 0x0015 when it is a modem and 0x2000 when it is a cdrom…

Check with lsusb what the product ID for your card is.

You will also need a APN string/number for you provider. This site is helpful. For KPN it is internet. The (bogus) username and password are also included there: username=KPN, password=gprs.

To finally log in I need umtsmon.

Making the call⌗

Configure umtsmon and set it to use the APN for your provider, in this case internet.

To actual use it: Make sure to usbserial module is loaded! Then:

• Kill network-manager: /etc/init.d/Network-Manager stop.
• Insert the dongle into an USB port
• Wait for some time as the dongle is first seen as a cdrom, and only thereafter as a modem… sigh. In dmesg you should see references to /dev/ttyUSB[012].
• Start umtsmon: sudo ./umtsmon
• Click “connect”
• Wait

Then you should see your ppp0 connection some to life. And I’m online!