zte 3g dongle
Posted: Nov 19th, '11, 02:36I've a bit of a puzzler here. I bought a ZTE "3" dongle to get online with my netbook,, et al when away from the house. I'm at the moment running Madriva 2010.2 on all my machines, but having seen and tried the shambles that is 2011, I'm giving serious thought to moving, lock, stock and barrel to Mageia. I've a desktop machine downstairs that is the mainstay, another of the same upstairs multi booted that I use for such things that I need Windows for, but otherwise gets used as a testbed for new OS's. Both of these ate AMD 64 bit machines. There's an ASUS 1008Ha which follows me about, an Asus EEEPC 701, which I've outgrown, but still comes in handy at times, and an ASUS Transformer that I'd really like to use the dongle on.
So to the installs. I installed the dongle on Windows upstairs, and on the dual boot Win XP on the ASUS 10008HA no problem. A partition on the machine upstairs running Mandriva 2011 refused to acknowledge the dongle, as did the partition running Ubuntu 10.1. However the partition running Mageia worked a treat. Just plugging the thing in brought up three entries in /dev, ttyusb0, ttyusb1 and ttyusb2. Wvdialconfig was happy with that and declared ttyusb1 and ttyusb2 suitable for use, and created an entry in /etc wvdial.conf. That only left me the task of editing the file to the connection details. Unfortunately there is no mobile signal in this area, so it wasn't possible to take this to the end. Here comes the problem. I did exactly the same thing with the ASUS 701 netbook, and whilst there are entries in /dev, they're not for a modem and wvdialconf does not find a modem. Strangely, the dongle is not recognised as a storage device either. There is no entry in /media, as there would have been for a storage device. The only difference between the machines is that the desktop runs on an AMD x86-64 and the 701 0n a 32 bit processor. All else is the same, as far as I know. I'm a bit reluctant to tear down the 1008HA, since it's running software that I use a lot, and which will not run on 64 bit machines.
So to the installs. I installed the dongle on Windows upstairs, and on the dual boot Win XP on the ASUS 10008HA no problem. A partition on the machine upstairs running Mandriva 2011 refused to acknowledge the dongle, as did the partition running Ubuntu 10.1. However the partition running Mageia worked a treat. Just plugging the thing in brought up three entries in /dev, ttyusb0, ttyusb1 and ttyusb2. Wvdialconfig was happy with that and declared ttyusb1 and ttyusb2 suitable for use, and created an entry in /etc wvdial.conf. That only left me the task of editing the file to the connection details. Unfortunately there is no mobile signal in this area, so it wasn't possible to take this to the end. Here comes the problem. I did exactly the same thing with the ASUS 701 netbook, and whilst there are entries in /dev, they're not for a modem and wvdialconf does not find a modem. Strangely, the dongle is not recognised as a storage device either. There is no entry in /media, as there would have been for a storage device. The only difference between the machines is that the desktop runs on an AMD x86-64 and the 701 0n a 32 bit processor. All else is the same, as far as I know. I'm a bit reluctant to tear down the 1008HA, since it's running software that I use a lot, and which will not run on 64 bit machines.