Samstag, 26. Juni 2010

Integrating a re-branded Huawai UMTS modem into Ubuntu 10.04

The Huawai E160 is a popular UMTS stick and works with Ubuntu Lucid Lynx out-of-the-box.

It is also commonly used by European phone companies in their mobile internet starter packs.  Unfortunately these sticks are usually sim-locked to the phone company and some identify themselves with a USB id unknown to current Ubuntu setup.

When you plug the stick into the computer, all you see is a small flash drive icon containing the Windows and sometimes Macintosh drivers.  On these systems the drivers switches the stick from mass storage device mode into modem mode after the initial phase.

The Linux utility for this task is called modem-modeswitch, and can be found in /lib/udev.  The actual task is to automate the execution of this utility when the UMTS stick is plugged in.

The UMTS stick in this example is/was sold by the Belgian phone company Mobistar.  When you query the USB IDs:

sudo lsusb

it is identified as

12d1:1446 Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. 


The two numbers at the beginning of the line are the vendor ID and product ID of the stick in the current mode.

To check if the modem switch works as expected, call the utility manually:

sudo /lib/udev/modem-modeswitch -v 0x12d1 -p 0x1446 -t option-zerocd

Wait a few seconds and check the USB IDs again.  The entry should now read:

12d1:1003 Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. E220 HSDPA Modem / E270 HSDPA/HSUPA Modem


If nothing happens, David Santinoli suggests in a related document to unmount the device containing the drivers before attempting the switch.

You can automate the process by creating the file 62-huawai.rules in /lib/udev/rules.d:

ATTRS{idVendor}=="12d1", ATTRS{idProduct}=="1446", RUN+="modem-modeswitch -v 0x%s{idVendor} -p 0x%s{idProduct} -t option-zerocd"

(The file name is arbitrary, as long as it starts with “62-” and ends with “.rules”.) The rule itself is based on similar entries in 61-option-modem-modeswitch.rules.

Next time you boot your computer, the rule becomes active, and the modem should be recognized automatically.

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