HUAWEI E220 on Ubuntu 8.04 with Dialog package

October 4, 2008 at 5:27 pm (FOSS, GNU/Linux, Life)

Recently I got to know through one of my friend that Dialog Telekom is giving a special Internet package mainly targeted for university students, and Dialog Telekom mentioned it that they’ll be able to give support for it to run on platforms such as Microsoft Windows XP & Vista(with some firmware upgrade) and Apple Mac OS (with some upgrades) but what really drives me to buy it although I’m mostly use GNU/Linux Ubuntu, because this connection give the me the freedom to experience high speed Internet connectivity almost everywhere I go(here at Moratuwa and at my home in Kandy). Compared with the other service providers its chargers are reasonable so didn’t adds up more trouble to my monthly expense list :-), As the initial cost I had to spend Rs 5.5K for the HUAWEI E220 modem, a deposite of Rs 3K and have to pay a monthly rental of Rs 1.5K for unlimited usage but once the monthly usage exceeds 5GB mark the uplink and downlink speed gets reduced 😦 , so I went ahead and bought it with my first payment I received from my part time work.

It was a small device where I can be very easily carried to anywhere I want to go and just plug to my PC and enjoy happy Internet surfing. It is a HSDPA/3G/GPRS USB Modem comes under the brand “vodafone” which gives upto maximum of 7.2MBps down link(thats far ahead of the normal ADSL connection) when we are in a 3G coverage area and for the rest it gives the facility through GPRS.

I was wondering about how I could configure this HUAWEI E220 modem to connect to Internet, so I tried several approaches found on the Internet and two of my friends who work with me at LSF helped me on this. With our collective effort we managed to configure it to run under Ubuntu 8.04 with a easy to use GUI based tool called Salutis Connect from Rudolf Adamkovič, and according to Ubuntu repository this tool is only available for versions 8.04 and 8.10. Similarly you can find another approach taken by Anuradha Rathnaweera.

Let see how it can be make it to run on your ubuntu box. Firstly plug in the HUAWEI E220 modem to your Ubuntu 8.04 box and open up a new terminal window(a bash shell) and type the following:

$ sudo wvdialconf /etc/wvdial.conf

Next you’ll see some results on your screen, it shows some details about the modem. Make sure that the system detects it as an USB modem first.

After that opens up the ‘wvdial.conf‘ file as a root privileged user (with sudo command) using your preferred text editor such as vim, gedit, etc.

$ sudo vim /etc/wvdial.conf

There you’ll get some fields commented, uncomment the ‘Phone‘ field and give the phone number as *99***1# and save the file. you may leave the Username and Password fields as it is.

Once you have finish with it type the following having the modem plugged.

$ sudo -s
# echo deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/salutis/ubuntu hardy main >> /etc/apt/sources.list
# aptitude update && aptitude install salutis-connect

Once the above process is finished goto Application > Internet and open the Salutis Connect. There select the first choice as shown in the following figure and click ‘Ok‘.

Next as shown with figure below it pops up a pane showing the progress of the connection establishment.

Once the connection is successfully established it tells you ‘ Wohoo! You’re connected, go ahead 🙂 ‘ so enjoy. More information can be found by referring this link.

Monitor your usage through a GUI

This application doesn’t provide the user to monitor the statistical details of it usage. It can be achieved by using the application provided at ‘http://oozie.fm.interia.pl/pro/huawei-e220/‘ but this needs bit of a knowledge with compiling and installing C source code and some dependent libraries under GNU/Linux.

Please visit the site and download the source package called ‘he220stat.tar.bz2‘.

Next goto the bottom part of that page and there it lists the dependent libraries required for compiling he source code under Debian/Ubuntu. These libraries can be easily installed to your distro by using the following commands:

$ sudo -s
# apt-get install build-essential (this may already be there in your system)
# apt-get install ncurses (somethimes without this it may compile)
# apt-get install ncurses-dev
# apt-get install xterm

Once your have successfully installed the above dependent libraries extract the downloaded tar ball (tar xjvf he220stat.tar.bz2 ) to any preferred location and compile it as follows

$ cd he220stat*
$ ./configure
$ make
$ make install
$ chmod + ./xhe220stat
$ ./xhe220stat – for a graphical view or $ ./he220stat – for a command line view

This is how it looks like on my Ubuntu 8.04

Latest findings: Recently I came across this link to deb file that helps us to install the Salutis Connect easily on Hardy.