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Home > > Howto: Debian Lenny & Huawei E160G

Howto: Debian Lenny & Huawei E160G

2:57 PM Posted by Dr. Irwan

So, in my last post I described how it was using the E160G with Debian. All in all it’s very good and i’ve not experienced any major issues, bar a few minor apt-get and NetworkManager issues. So, heres a quick rundown of how to get it on your machine.

So first, you need to get the hardware to work correctly under Debian. Plug in your E160G and check dmesg to see if the device recognises correctly. If you see ttyUSB0/ttyUSB1 appear you can skip this step.

First, you need to download USB_Modeswitch:

# wget http://www.draisberghof.de/usb_modeswitch/usb_modeswitch-0.9.4.tar.bz2
# tar jxvf usb_modeswitch-0.9.4.tar.bz2
# cd usb_modeswitch-0.9.4/
# ./compile.sh


Now you have the usb_modeswitch program, as this will be executed by udev it needs to be in a sensible location, personally i’d copy it to /usr/local/sbin/

# cp usb_modeswitch /usr/local/sbin/


Also, you need to grab the latest config file from the usb_modeswitch website and put it into /etc

#
wget http://www.draisberghof.de/usb_modeswitch/usb_modeswitch.conf
# sudo mv usb_modeswitch.conf /etc/


Now, by default the config file comes with the section commented out, so edit the file and uncomment the section for the E220 (which is essentially the same device).

# sudo $EDITOR /etc/usb_modeswitch.conf


One last step, you need to add a small configuration file to udev to detect the E160G and run usb_modeswitch, put this file in you /etc/udev/rules.d/ folder:

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", SYSFS{idProduct}=="1003", SYSFS{idVendor}=="12d1",
RUN+="/usr/local/sbin/usb_modeswitch"


Restart udev, and plug in your E160G…

sudo /etc/init.d/udev restart

and you should see something similar to:

[ 16.085904] usb 5-3: GSM modem (1-port) converter now attached to ttyUSB0
[ 16.086033] usb 5-3: GSM modem (1-port) converter now attached to ttyUSB1


So, the device is detected and you have your USB ports, first a quick overview. The E160G shows two serial ports, one is a data port, the other is for control signals. NetworkManager only makes use of one of these ports but the Vodafone Connection Manager uses both. Now you have a choice, install Network Manager 0.7 to gain native GPRS/UMTS data support or use another package. I went for Network Manager, while it’s still in beta and i’ve had a few run-ins in the past with it I decided to give it a go.

So, it was a simple case of adding the 0.7 repositories to /etc/apt/sources.list, updating, then installing the needed packages.

# echo "deb http://debs.michaelbiebl.de/ unstable main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
# apt-get update
# apt-get -t unstable install network-manager


You might need to remove any old Network Manager packages before you do this, as network-manager-openvpn collides with the new package.

Hopefully thats give you the overview you needed, and you should be up and running!
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